Tag Archives: Pastor Thoughts

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

The Apocalypse of John the Baptizer’s Community

Leave a comment

You may have noticed that for a few weeks now, the titles of my weekly reflections have had mention of Apocalypse in them. You may be thinking that I am starting to sound like one of those Hellfire and Brimstone types. Maybe that is true. However, unlike in the movies, Apocalypse biblically carries a different definition than just the end of the world. Apocalypse comes from the Greek meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revealing.’ Apocalyptic literature speaks to the revealing of God’s plan or designs for the world or God’s intention to make right. This lands at the heart of created existence, where this ‘making right’ is contested or in a state of conflict. The Apocalypse or revealing is where God’s Kingdom coming to make the world righteous is in conflict with the powers of sin, death and the devil – forces that we experience in this world that are in opposition to God’s great love for us. 

Phew…

With that understanding of Apocalypse, we pick up with John the Baptist. Who is speaking to the crowds who have come out into the wilderness to hear him and be baptized for repentance and the forgiveness of sins. This follows with the long history of Israel seeking out prophets sent by God in times of crisis and seeking to repent of the ways in which God’s people have turned away from God. John is standing in a role they know and can identify from the Scriptures, and they are seeking to repent just as good people of faith should. 

Yet, they don’t quite get there. John isn’t just preaching repentance like the prophets of old. He is also preaching the coming of another, a Messiah. 

The crowd responds peculiarly. They ask John, “What then should we do?”

They ask this three times: “What should we do?”

In a time of crisis, when the world feels like everything is falling down around them, when the powers are threatening to crush them, when the future feels terribly uncertain, they want to know what they can do. Each of John’s answers is unsatisfying. 

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

In a time of great uncovering and revealing the deep and uncomfortable truths at the heart of our existence, the apocalyptic conflict between God’s making right and the powers of sin, death and the devil that we can feel palpable in our world… the answers to our wonderings of, “what should we do?” have proven equally unsatisfying.

Maybe that is the point. It seems to be John’s point. Maybe what we need to do isn’t the chief issue. In this moment of Apocalypse, what we do just might be secondary to our salvation. The uncovering of what is really happening to us as God’s people is still in process, still being made known to us. But as we turn to the second half of Advent, I am sure it has something to do with the One we are waiting for, the One who is coming. 

The Messiah is on the way. 

Pastor Thoughts, Sermon, Theology & Culture

Apocalypse is waiting

Leave a comment

This week, we have stepped fully into Advent, the season that begins each liturgical year with waiting and watching for Messiah. Advent is the favourite season of most pastors and deacons, and I know more than a few lay folks who love Advent as well. There is something about those shades of blue that captures the essence of the night sky in this season of darkness. The Advent hymns of hope and longing speak deeply to the reality of our world. Advent doesn’t rush us to the good part of the story… rather, it takes its time unfolding. We are just starting this season now in the Church, whereas many in the world have been celebrating Christmas since November 1st. 

I think this love and connection to Advent is precisely because of the contrast it offers to the expectations of Christmas that begin ramping up in November with Christmas parties, concerts, baking, decorating, Hallmark movies and holiday muzak playing on radios everywhere. Our calendars fill up; we have to summon the energy to be social, to be good guests and hosts, and to be present physically, mentally, and emotionally at events with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers. It can be delightful, difficult, busy, tiring, fun or all of those things at once.

Conversely, Advent is about preparation and anticipation. Not in the frantic getting-the-house-ready-for-company kind of way, but in the quiet-stillness-of- your-own-thoughts-and-a-hot-cup-of-coffee-at-dawn kind of way. Advent calls us to slow down, to be present in our own minds and thoughts, in our bodies and hearts. Advent calls us to watch and listen for God, to prepare our hearts for Messiah, to attend to pregnant possibilities of divine activity in our world. 

In the four weeks of Advent, we journey from big to small. In the first week, we begin in the cosmic and apocalyptic realm, where Jesus calls us to pay attention. God is at work bringing the Kingdom of God to confront the kingdoms of sin, death and the devil. 

In the second week, we hear John the Baptist preach about the Kingdom of Israel, of empires and rulers, of politics and nations. 

In the third week, we keep shrinking down: John addresses the crowds before him on the River Jordan. 

Finally, in the fourth week, we witness an intimate conversation between Elizabeth and her cousin Mary, two women pregnant with miraculous babies. 

In Advent, divine activity is revealed in all the levels of our existence, from the cosmic, to the political, to the communal, down to the intimate. And yet, divine activity begins in this final and special place—in the wombs of our mothers. In this most intimate and closest of relationships we can have as human beings, God enters into creation in order to meet us in Christ. From this smallest and closest of beginnings, Christ proceeds to encounter the fullness of creation, joining God once again in divine fullness to every part of our existence. From incarnation and birth to crucifixion and death, Christ becomes one with us. And then, in the Resurrection, Christ’s apocalyptic renewal and reordering of our world in a new creation, we become one in Christ. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Waiting for the Apocalyptic Kingdom

Leave a comment

We have arrived at Christ the King Sunday. This is the end of the liturgical year, which means we have made our way through the stories of Jesus’ birth, journey to Jerusalem, death and resurrection as told by the season of Advent through Easter. We have also made it through Jesus’ teaching and ministry as told by the Gospel of Mark. 

Altogether, these two parts of the liturgical year serve to create a narrative that takes us through the story of Jesus each year. 

There is another piece to this journey, however. This liturgical move is more than one that moves us from one year to the next. The move we make in our calendars and in our Sunday worship shows us a glimpse of the much larger scale movement that is happening all around us. 

Christ the King Sunday, or perhaps more accurately, the Reign of Christ Sunday, lifts the Apocalyptic veil on our world. No, not an apocalypse like the movies imagine with zombies, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, or exorcist priests fighting demons.

Rather, the Apocalypse as the Biblical Narrative imagines it, the one that we have had in the background in this year of reading Mark, and perhaps in the background of pandemics, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the election of populist leaders that are tracking to fascism. Apocalypse hardly seems like the thing of movies and novels these days, it is out there in the world. 

The Apocalypse that the Bible imagines is one that is rooted in the conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Sin, Death and the Devil. On Christ the King Sunday we are equally concerned with the fact that the Kingdom of God has entered the battle plains of this world with the intention of striving against those forces that would defy the One who holds all creation and us within God as we are with Christ’s Kingship. 

This is the work of God’s Kingdom in the world, to push back against all those forces that cause suffering and death, the forces of systematic sin and evil that cause oppression and enslave us.

But God’s Kingdom’s work is not the one of military might or political and economic power.  Rather, it is accomplished on the cross, in the one who takes our sin and death to the grave while exchanging with us the gifts of forgiveness, righteousness and life. The Kingdom’s work is to meet the powers of this world with the reconciling mercy of God, with true Kingdom power that can transform this world for the better. 

On the Christ the King Sunday, we prepare for the Apocalypse of Biblical proportions to come – for it to flip us over into the Advent of God’s new world, where we will be new creations. 

Doctor of Ministry, Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

All Saints and Communal Grief

1 Comment

All Saints Sunday is usually one of my favourite Sundays of the year. It comes near the end of the liturgical year, as we have been making our way through the teaching and parables part of the Gospels. There is often a feeling of being taken somewhere and getting to the destination after three to four months of dwelling in either Matthew, Mark or Luke’s Ordinary Time texts. All Saints Sunday arrives with a view of what is to come afterwards. It points us to Advent and it paints a picture of God’s promises coming true at the end of time–two versions of what is coming next for us. 

This year, however, All Saints is hitting me a little differently. I haven’t been looking forward to it or thinking about it in the same way. It might be that I have been thinking a lot more about the Reformation  and Martin Luther in my studies. (Those are certainly a big part of it). 

But there is another piece of All Saints Sunday that I have been both pushing out of my thoughts in some moments and desperately longing for in the next. One of the primary images of All Saints is of the great multitude of the faithful gathered before the throne of God. It is a Revelation image, one that we often allude to in our liturgical music, particularly the Hymn of Praise or the Gloria. We believe that when we sing these songs we are not just worshipping God here on earth. We are also joining in the continuous heavenly worship of the saints. We are literally singing with the great multitude of the faithful.

Much of the artwork and images of the great multitude depict it as a large and faceless gathering, where the size and cosmic nature of the scene is the point. And yet, the longer I have served in ministry and the older I get as a person, more and more that faceless crowd starts to add to it faces that I know. Faces that I have known and served and buried. This year, it  the multitude of Revelation, the great cloud of witnesses at All Saints, also includes my grandmother and my father. 

I have always imagined that All Saints Sunday had the capacity to raise feelings and experiences of grief… but this year I know that it does. I wrote in the summer that there is a profound loneliness that goes along with death–of being the one to walk the journey of dying or of going on it as far as you can when the dying person is someone close to you. Now, I don’t mean lonely in the sense of being sad, but more descriptive loneliness, like isolation. As the one who is dying, there is a journey taken that you know you will have to complete alone. As the loved one who is left behind, there comes a place where journeys diverge, almost like one experiences in airport security–a place where you can go no further. Only the one actually headed for the new destination can keep going through. 

Even though so many of us have taken that journey as far as we can with loved ones, each journey is unique. Each experience of loneliness and isolation is its own to contend with. Letting go is a place and process that we arrive at, each in our own way. I think that is why sudden and tragic deaths can be so painful. The journey and process of letting go happens in an instant with no time to prepare oneself; the letting go process becomes one of tearing away. 

Now, before I dwell on the grief experience too long, there is this thing that All Saints does. It reminds us of that dying journey and of the grief. That is the part I have been pushing out of my mind as I think about Luther (even if he had a way to address death with the hope of the Gospel). 

But there is this other thing that All Saints does. It gathers together all these lonely and isolating journeys of death and grief and stitches them together. It takes individual experiences and turns them into a communal one. We bring our individual grief to All Saints, where we sing, we pray, we light candles, and we commune as one body, one multitude of the saints. We rehearse the hymns that we will sing before the throne of God. And somehow this restores us to Community and begins to undo the isolating power of death. 

This restoration is the side of All Saints that I am longing for and needing this year, as I am sure many of us are. Through restoring our Community, God brings us back into the Body of Christ, the great multitude of the faithful. All those faces that we know there welcome us home, with open arms. 

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

A Reformed Reformation Sunday?

Leave a comment

With October coming to an end, we prepare for that big occasion on October 31st… no, not the one with kids in costumes, candy and scary decorations in many front yards. That other occasion that is important to Lutherans and those who study 16th-century history – Reformation Day. 

This Reformation Day, it is hard to believe that we have been talking about Luther and thinking about his life for months now. Yes, I know it has been me coming back to his story and sharing photos from my trip to Reformation sites this year. When I started looking at and considering doctoral programs a few years ago, I looked at studying history with a focus on the Reformation. When I settled on the Doctor of Ministry program at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, I didn’t do so thinking that Luther would be central to my program of study. My research topic wondering what Lutherans think and believe about the role of clergy has morphed into what Martin Luther thought and wrote about the role of clergy in congregations and communities. 

Yet, here we are. I have travelled to Germany, walked where Luther lived and worked. I have read many, many books, written papers, lectured to a variety of groups and discovered a richness in knowing Luther’s life and work more now than I ever expected to. I was teased often in Seminary for caring about Luther too much; but now I remember the teasing from my classmates with pride. The place that Martin Luther occupies in our history as Lutherans, and among all Protestants, is hard to describe at times. 

With Martin Luther now a central part of my doctoral studies, and considering my research, Reformation Day arrives with a very different air about it. Even as someone who loved history, loved Lutheran history in particular and got teased for loving it too much, I always wanted to make sure that Reformation Sunday wasn’t a time to just celebrate Luther and forget about the Gospel. So I have been cautious on past Reformation Sundays not to talk about Luther too much. 

This year, I am less worried about that. Not because Luther should overshadow the Gospel we usually proclaim on Sunday mornings, but because when you dive into Luther’s life, his ideas and thoughts, his writing and story, it becomes clear that nearly everything he did was with the intention of focusing people on the Gospel. He was obsessed with making sure that the people around him would hear the Gospel. He spoke out when he saw the abuses of the church. He sought to encourage the people he served to live lives of faith, caring for one another rather than trying to earn salvation. And, he was pretty certain of his own flawed and infallible nature. 

As Lutherans, we do not worship Luther. We don’t believe that the things he did would save us from sin and death. But in hearing about the things that Luther did, the things he wrote, and his witness to the gospel, we can hear the Gospel of Christ in a new way and hope that we, too, can live lives of faith and service as Luther did.