Posted by stpauls on May 30, 2010 under Sermons | 
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on May 30, 2010, Trinity Sunday.]
There are a few people who reproach the doctrine of the Trinity as too difficult or too ambitious a doctrine to accept. Some preachers find it easier as a result to respond to this accusation by preaching a gospel that cannot be disagreed with, which affirms nothing, and they hasten to apologize for the difficulty of this doctrine. Let it be clear that I have no time for such preachers. Our celebration of God as Trinity is the cornerstone of all that we say and do as a Church.
We will shortly hear a little report about the recent meeting of Synod and its deliberation on mission. The readings set for this great feast remind us that if we want to speak adequately of mission, we have to speak of the Trinity, of God’s life as communion, and for us to engage in mission is for us to be touched by the life of the Trinity, to be touched by what the wisdom of God, that appears addressing us in the first lesson, purposes, reflecting back to God his own generous outpouring in creation.
In our Gospel reading today, we are given a reflection of God’s Communion as a mission of dispossession: God’s sending of Jesus, like the eternal coming-forth of the Wisdom, is a giving-away: “All that the Father has is mine” (John 16:15), all the divine authority is shown in Jesus. But, this authority is shown in Jesus’ complete “givenness” too; for the Spirit “will take what is mine and declare it to you,” yet the Spirit does not give anything of his own either. Jesus, like the Father, holds nothing back, being at the disposal of the divine will to communion, making his flesh and blood the concrete space for community to happen. To belong in the Church’s community is to be involved in an act of giving away: to be at the disposal of God’s will, to give away the life we have, so that God’s life can be given through us. The Church receives the divine fullness in order to give it away.
For us, here and now, this means first that in a society like ours, which is increasingly fragmented, where the rule “you are either with me or against me” reigns, the bare fact of the Church’s presence and gathering at the altar presents a counter social program, that is based on divine communion, which rules and judges the entirety of our lives; there should not be space for competitiveness and hostility here, for the sole rationale of our gathering is the breaking down of divisions, the peace that we have in Christ, which Paul spoke about in the letter to the Romans. The letter to the Romans reminds us that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. This makes us, Paul continues to say, boast, not only of the glory that is revealed, but also of our own suffering.
Jesus’ mission came to a moment of crisis, remember; yet, the cross is where fullness of life is given, where it all ended and started again. So, what this defines is a life (our life, your life, my life) that is also vulnerable to change and betrayal. The actual life of the Church as we know has never been without division and failures. This does not exclude this Church community, or this diocese, or indeed our Anglican Communion. Yet, whenever we stand here and remind ourselves of whose and who we are in word and sacrament, we are making a statement about our mission: we are a provocation to a divided society; because we are acknowledging that our unity is sustainable because of trust in the divine commitment made clear in the Easter event. So, we are called to show that we can make a difference in the world as we seek to live in a community of hope as Paul put it, even if we cannot make all the difference that it requires.
Second, celebrating God as Trinity is not only saying something about God; it is also saying something about human beings. When we hear passages from our readings today like: “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…in whose grace we stand”; or, “when the Spirit comes he will guide you to all truth,” we are reminded that the point of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is that humanity should look different. Those who are called to stand where Jesus stands are called to display that new humanity.
Our celebration of God as Trinity is telling us that our humanity is simply trapped in untruthfulness, and cannot be restored without God’s grace; we cannot even give to God what it is our calling and our gift to give – loving obedience, mirroring God’s own life in our mortal context. We cannot honour God in the sense that we cannot allow God to be God in our lives, and so we cannot allow ourselves to be ourselves. We do not honour or do justice to God, because dishonour and injustice are about the effort to reduce one another to the scope of our own needs and demands. Honour and justice are about respecting the truth of another’s reality.
Human beings are not good at this and we see it today in our dishonouring of the dignities of many – of the powerless millions coping with the effects of the economic and environmental crises to begin with. We prefer to deny such things and seek easy harmonies. Our own very dear Rector’s warden Richard was himself last weekend in Winnipeg where he witnessed the state of First Nation communities. As far as I could understand of what he said was to the effect that we may claim local friendliness but this is not enough in a society that claims to seek justice. Thus, there is indeed a political witness for the Church, let us not forget, that stems from its firm belief in God as communion, as Trinity.
Before we all stress too hastily our belonging to the assumptions of a liberal society, our celebration today is also a call as a Church to be in Communion with those for whom the most liberal politics of the secular world could not have room: those who simply do not have a “normal” human future to speak of: the elderly; the dying child; those in the so-called developing world, for whom no amount of liberationist talk is going to make a difference in the face of disease, famine and national debt; people with AIDS; the disabled; and so on; for God, in Jesus, has claimed them as his own.
The doctrine of God in Christianity is an invitation, a passing on Jesus’ invitation to be changed, to repent and trust him, to walk with him. This can only begin when we stand where Jesus stands, here and now at the altar. Our peace and our healing are to be found simply and definitively when we pray to the Father in the words of Jesus and so acknowledge the Father’s glory as it deserves to be acknowledged. It is in prayer that we are able to express our faith in who God is; it is not in rational tracts of systematic theology. The implication for us perhaps is that we can never be able to speak properly of God, or of ourselves for that matter unless we pray.
Call me old-fashioned, or indeed conservative if you like, but I do believe that those who do not pray cannot speak properly, whether about God or anything else for that matter. When we say the “Our Father” at the Eucharist right after the consecration of the bread and the wine, we stand with Jesus literally where he is, and say what Jesus says. We put ourselves in the place of Jesus. This is the enormity of the calling of each and every one of us to speak to the Father in Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and let Jesus pray in us.
Therefore, whatever it is that we do in thinking about our mission, we do that which stems out of our trust and joy in the holiness of God that binds us together in voices of praise and the sharing of the gift of Christ that makes us holy, singing and praising: “Holy, holy, holy Lord: The whole earth is full of your glory.”
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
John 16:12-15 ~ Gospel Reading for May 30, 2010
Jesus said to the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Romans 5:1-5 ~ Bible Reading for May 30, 2010
Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 ~ Bible Reading for May 30, 2010
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
Posted by stpauls on May 29, 2010 under Contributors, Webmaster Blog |
The approved minutes from the April 27th meeting have been posted in the narthex and on the bulletin boards. Photocopies are available at the back of the church. If you would like an e-mail copy, please contact the Church Office.
Among the issues discussed in the minutes:
- renovation of the chapel adjacent to the columbarium,
- publicity, and
- the search for donations from outside sources.
Any parishioner may attend Church Committee meetings. Meetings are usually held on the fourth Tuesday evening of each month.
Have questions or comments? Feel free to speak to one of the Wardens or Committee members.(their names are found on the back page of each Sunday bulletin).
Posted by stpauls on May 23, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on May 23, 2010, Pentecost Sunday.]
On this day, nine years ago, I was ordained as a priest in Nazareth to work for the Anglican Church. The ordination was first planned to take place in Jerusalem. However, after a suicide bombing taking place that weekend on the Saturday, many of those who were scheduled to travel to Jerusalem decided to cancel, not knowing how the political tensions would develop. To make it easier, the bishop decided to hold the ordination in Nazareth.
It was a weekend full of tension, uncertainty, and fear. It was one particular occasion when those who visited from abroad to attend the ordination were conscious of the human complexity of so much they had seen and shared. This was a moment when choices seemed more dramatically clear. It felt that there was a sense in which you had to answer certain central questions about where you stood and with whom you belonged. Our experience at the time of my ordination was only a pale reflection of what many local people feel and suffer on a daily basis. The many stories of people with years of draining, and hunger, and resilience (like the people of Gaza today, for example), makes one ask whether anywhere could ever be a home to them apart from that home. If they come to Vancouver, it would look trivial and colourless, not many dramas on the street, and with a different moral world under a grey and cloudy sky.
In Israel/Palestine, there is a division between peoples, a dividing wall that makes it difficult for each side to look into the eyes of the other and be able to speak to the other a language that might make it possible for both sides to be transformed. In Vancouver, generally people live their own individual life, and unless you are part of any particular social context, you can live a perfectly good life, and have a perfectly good job without relating to strangers. And in our modern global culture on the whole, we have all been totally sunk in the Enlightenment stress on individuation, whilst “the other,” whoever that other might be, may be good mainly for manipulation, to be used for our own interests and nothing more, and the results have been disastrous in Western societies.
So you might ask: what does this have to do with Pentecost day? People sometimes talk about Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. But, as I mentioned in my last sermon, the birthday of the Church begins with the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Church is where Jesus gathers people to him in the name of the father.
This is a bit like Philip’s question in the gospel today: “Show us the father.”
“Have you been with me all this time and still asking such questions?”
But, we do celebrate something specific on this day, and that is how the friends of Jesus come, not simply to realize the reality of the Father and the Son, but also are able to communicate the true meaning of Christ’s cross and Resurrection to others. When the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ becomes manifest in a way that the disciples did not expect, talking to those they never thought they would speak to, or as the story puts it: “having the gift of tongues.” At a time of frustration and fear, the new community catches the fire of divine fellowship, and those “fisher men” of Galilee are granted the fire of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ, risen, ascended and glorified through the power of the Holy Spirit. The disciples begin to understand that what they say about Jesus is something that can be communicated to strangers.
This is the main theme of this feast. It is a reminder that we can speak to one another and to strangers and communicate in a way that we thought we would not. For God makes it possible for us to do so. We can even speak to our enemies, be they Israelis or Palestinians. We can speak to those who hurt us, we can speak to those in our society here and communicate to divided communities, even across the Anglican Communion divide, believe it or not, in a way we thought we could not.
But, we need to acknowledge that this is a gift and it is a gift that becomes possible when we also pray and ask for it. It is a gift that is accessible and available to every conceivable human being everywhere, because the Holy Spirit does not live inside churches and not outside. You do not come to St. Paul’s and knock at the door, and ask, “is the Holy Spirit here?,” because the Holy Spirit fills the earth from end to end. It is the reality of life.
But, St. Paul’s, like all churches, is a sign that the Holy Spirit is here in our hearts, in the lives of people all around. The Holy Spirit seeks to work more deeply and more fully, in the lives of every one of us. The church declares God’s Holy Spirit seeks to be here, and here and here, in life after life, situation after situation, one face after another – God’s Holy Spirit seeks to bring alive the reflection of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
It is the Spirit of Truth, we heard in the Gospel of today. So, we are called to be people of the truth. On a basic level, this means something obvious. It means that we must be trustworthy and honest and straightforward; we must not dress up our failures; we must not deny our weaknesses.
But, there is something deeper. We, like the disciples today, are also to tell the world the truth about God and the truth about human beings. That truth about God is that God does not go away. God does not get bored. God does not think of the world and say: “No, I do not think I can be bothered with them any longer. They are not doing very well, I will go back to heaven.”
No. God is there, the reality of all our lives, a reality we have come to acknowledge in Jesus Christ face to face. And what about the truth of us human beings? Are we here in the world only for pleasure? For making money? For being secure? Just like the animal creation? No.
The truth about us is that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and we have in us the glorious capacity for freedom for service, and for love, as the letter to the Romans tells us today. Jesus has shown us what it means to be human. That is why we are Christian. Christians are Christians not because everything is clear, not because we know exactly what we ought to do, when and how, and because we have all the right answers to questions. Christians are Christians because they sense that God’s own life, broken, shared, and buried has proved to be un-containable. It has spread out, kindled and renewed lives the world over beginning from Jerusalem; hence, Pentecost.
In the strength of the glimpse of the Holy Spirit, things become possible, possible to tell the truth around, the only truth that will make a difference to us and to our society, learning from Jesus through the power of the Spirit how to live in our own environment, feeling at home even in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, growing in the habit of receiving everything around us as gift, not as possession. That gift is offered to every one of us individually, and to us as a Church community in this Eucharist, where we are united, not simply by common abstract beliefs, but rather by the gift of God’s own communion with us, through the power of the Spirit that points and manifests Jesus to us literally and concretely in the bread and wine. Eat him and live.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
John 14:8-17 (read in Italian) ~ Gospel Reading for May 23, 2010
Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Romans 8:14-17 (read in French) ~ Bible Reading for May 23, 2010
All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Acts 2:1-21 ~ Bible Reading for May 23, 2010
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs– in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ “
Posted by stpauls on May 16, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by Preacher Sandra Vander Schaaf on May 16, 2010, the Sunday after Ascension.]
At Christmas, we celebrate God with us – Immanuel. At Easter, we celebrate God for us – Redeemer. Today we celebrate the Ascension, which, to me, is like Christmas and Easter wrapped up together and taken up a notch. Taken up into Heaven, in fact. The Jesus who embraced humanity by becoming one of us in flesh and blood, the Jesus who identified so fully with the human experience that he suffered and died, the Jesus who overcame death and lived again to eat and drink with his disciples – This Jesus now commissions his followers and … leaves. Yes, this is the celebration of the now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t Jesus. And the significance of this event – pulled together with what we get to celebrate next week, Pentecost – informs the entirety of our Christian faith. It’s our reason for being, the foundation of our hope.
In the Ascension, Jesus Christ brings his resurrection body home, to dwell once again with God in the heavenly realm, not shedding his humanity, but taking it with him. He descended to us, but ascends with us. He becomes the place where heaven and earth are joined together. Jesus – risen and glorious, the very substance of humankind, renewed and restored and fitted for glory – dwells with God.
This is what the Christian faith is all about. In the ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ, God’s longing for communion with his beloved creation (including our humanity), meets our longing for communion with God. The divide between heaven and earth is bridged. Jesus becomes the firstborn of the new creation, where the overlapping and interlocking spheres of heaven and earth are fully joined, and the sovereign LORD is all in all. This is the inauguration of the kingdom, and the start of kingdom work, which is the redemption of all of creation so that it really will be on earth as it is in heaven.
The Ascension takes place on the road to Bethany, the same road where the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem began, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday. Jesus calls his disciples to the work of the Kingdom. A kingdom beyond any they’d imagined on Palm Sunday. He promises the Holy Spirit as the means by which the disciples will be empowered to the task, and as the mark of God’s own power on earth. And He promises to return again, to finish the work of kingdom building on earth, to fulfill all that was spoken of in the scriptures. And then, shrouded in clouds of mystery and miracle, Jesus departs.
In this moment, Jesus steps out of the earthly realm and is no longer bound by the limits of time and space and matter as we know them. That is not to say that he sheds his body – the tomb is still empty and there is no body left behind on the road to Bethany. In the mystery that we embrace by faith, Jesus departs. In this act, his presence and power are no longer limited to the time and place of first century Jerusalem. By the action of the Holy Spirit, he is now present to all people, of all times, and of all nations.
In the Ascension, we celebrate the here-and-not-here Jesus of the now-and-not-yet Kingdom. We set our hearts on the day when the heaven-and-earth kingdom of God will be well and truly and finally established, where sin and death have no hold on us, where humanity and divinity dwell together, in a kingdom of peace and justice, where we live as healed, whole, undivided, cherished children of God.
In truth, we celebrate this here-and-not-here Jesus every Sunday. Every Sunday, we get together to express our longing for the kingdom of peace and justice. We come together to express our thanks for every little or big glimpse of God’s kingdom on earth now – in the places where love and peace and justice and beauty break through now. And we affirm our commitment to joining Christ in the work of the Kingdom, moving continually toward the complete renewal of all creation.
Every Sunday we make time for intercessions, and we know we can pray with confidence, because we are not reciting a wish list to some Santa Claus God. Rather, we know ourselves to be praying with Jesus, who himself intercedes for us, who understands our longings and has brought the human experience into the very heart of God.
Every Sunday we recite the Lord’s Prayer and declare our desire for “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” For what is the kingdom? What is the will of God? That all things be filled with the glorious, all-encompassing, redemptive love of God.
Every Sunday, we sing Holy, Holy, Holy, in the now-and-not-yet kingdom, with our not yet resurrected voices. And in our worship, we sing with the saints of every age. And we sing that the one who comes in the name of the LORD is blessed. And this blessed one is Jesus, and it is us, and it is anyone who comes in the name of the One who longs to fill the world with the glory of God’s love, peace and justice.
Every Sunday we proclaim our faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. We proclaim that our hope is in this magnificent truth. We proclaim that in Jesus, the human experience will be what it is meant to be: life lived in glorious correspondence with our loving God.
Every Sunday, we gather at the table to remember the humanity of Jesus, we celebrate the physicality of Christ. Take and eat, he says, and remember that I am also flesh and blood. Take and eat, he says, for, by my flesh and blood, sin no longer has a hold on you and death is not the end of the story. Take and eat, he says, because your humanity is given back to you – restored and redeemed. Take and eat, he says, because you need nourishment for this journey, a journey we take together. Take and eat, this is the bread of Heaven and the cup of salvation, this is your taste of the kingdom come.
In the sacraments, in the life of the Church, in our individual and collective mission and ministry, we are in communion with the here-and-not-here Jesus, and we are present to the now-and-not-yet kingdom. In the union of God’s space (heaven) and our space (earth), accomplished in the body of Jesus Christ, the new creation is begun. Humanity has been fully drawn into the purposes of God. We are fully drawn into the purposes of God, body and soul.
The Holy Spirit connects us in our humanity to the ongoing Incarnation to embody the purposes of God, to give the redeeming work of God hands and feet in the here and now. The ongoing work of this kingdom requires bodies. Our bodies matter in the purposes of God. As Beth Felker-Jones writes, in her book The Marks of His Wounds, “Christians only come to understand what our bodies are for as God reworks us … into a tangible challenge to the inevitability of brokenness.”
Because of the Ascension, by the power of Pentecost, we become living witnesses to the glory of God, living agents of the love of God, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Let us go forth in joy and in confidence, living our lives in Christ as a tangible challenge to the inevitability of brokenness.
Amen and amen.
