Tag Archives: Sermon

The Church is Beginning – A Maundy Thursday Sermon

April 6, 2023 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

GOSPEL: John 13:1-17, 31b-35
And during supper 3Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

*Note: Sermons are posted in the manuscript draft that they were preached in, and may contain typos or other errors that were resolved in my delivery. See the Sherwood Park Lutheran Facebook Page for video

Tonight is the beginning. Tonight the church begins the 3 days. Tonight the church begins.

“You will never wash my feet.”

As Jesus kneels before Peter, towel in hand, the moment between Teacher and follower feels like a moments that we have been rehearsing in our own ways over the past few years.

There is a part of us that wants to just tell Peter, “Stop being so stubborn, brother! If Jesus wants to wash your feet, let him do it!”

It is the part of us that knows better, that knows that if Jesus is offering, the best we can do is open our hands, our hearts, our ears and eyes to receive.

But there is the other part of us that has lived versions of this moment before.

“You will never get me to do that again.” Has been a refrain during this pandemic.

Peter’s visceral reaction is one we have felt in so many different ways. Things that we once never thought about we now have strong feelings over.

So when Peter arrives for dinner and sees Jesus kneeling on the floor washing feet, his reaction isn’t so foreign anymore.

4 Maundy Thursdays into the pandemic, and we are finally back around the table of the Last Supper… and how changed we are. The experiences we bring to this table maybe help us to understand Peter a little better… they maybe help to us to understand all the disciples a little better.

We now get what it feels like to wander with uncertainty for years, following and trying to trust that Jesus will show us the way. Amazed by the miracles, but confused by where this journey might take us.

Tonight is the first night of the Triduum, the Three Days, of Jesus Passover from death to life. The stage and setting starts small tonight, or at least it feels that way.

A small group gathered for dinner and worship, Peter and his strong feelings about having his feet washed by his teacher, and lessons on community, advice on how to live with one another given by a teacher to his followers.

Maundy Thursday, this first night of the 3 Days is meant to draw us in. To pick us up from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and remind us that the shouts of crucify are coming.

And yet, we also know this table from our Sunday gatherings. We know that this table isn’t just a dinner party hidden away from the world, but something more.

The foot washing, and the new commandment bookend the beginning of something that will grow beyond our imagination. The Lord’s table is revealed tonight, table where bread and wine are shared, the table where Body and Blood is given, the table where the Body of Christ gathers – gathers across time and space. The table that brings the Church into being.

Because it is to the Lord’s Table, to this table tonight, to this table from the first Maundy Thursday, that the Church will continually return to, week after week after week.

Because it is at the Lord’s table, where the assembly, where believers in faith, gathers to hear the word and to receive God’s promise given in bread and wine.

Because it is tonight that God’s promises are given for the sake of the world, where the promises that death on Friday and life on Sunday are forever interwoven.

Even as Peter protests having his feet washed, even as we have own strong feelings. Even as Jesus proclaims a new commandment, that we ought to love one another… and we fail to uphold and keep that commandment…

This night is still the moment that church continually returns to. The moment just before the chaos erupts into the world, a moment of respite and reprieve… the where faithful and flawed and opinionated followers find themselves at the table with Jesus… and there Jesus passes on the things of God, food that transforms us for life, a body of Christ that turns us into the Body of Christ.

Tonight we begin these three days at the Lord’s table, and here God begins the church. The church that will go to cross tomorrow and the empty tomb on Sunday. The church that proclaims the mystery of faith each time it gathers at the table again – Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

Tonight is the beginning. Tonight the church begins the 3 days. Tonight the church begins.

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

More Lenten “Why?” Questions

March 12, 2023 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

This Lent has been centered around the question of “Why?”

We have been sharing in Soup+Bread Lenten studies following worship and it has been invigorating – at least for me! As a pastor, I really enjoy the opportunities to teach that come along from time to time. But I hope that participants have been getting as much out of our sessions as I have. Our conversations have been lively and I think I have seen moments when people have been opened up to new ideas and understandings.

So far we have explored the ideas of “Why Faith?” and “Why Christianity?”.

This week we will explore the questions, “Why the Word? Why do we read the Bible?”

Now, if you want to know why we read the Bible as Christians, how we understand it together, why we read it and not other books, you will have to come to our study on Sunday!

But for the past number of months, I have been asking my own “why?” questions about the Bible. Particularly, I have been wondering about how we listen to the Word in worship. How I listen to the Word in worship.

Now this might seem a like a strange thing to wonder about. Isn’t the answer obvious? Someone reads the reading and the rest of us listen/read along, right? On the surface that is true, but there is a lot more to it than that.

In fact, in our liturgy class in seminary there was a lot of time devoted to understanding just what we were doing when we read from the Scriptures in worship.

We talked about how Scripture is read. Does the reader read it like a Shakespearian actor delivering a soliloquy? Or like Ferris Bueller’s teacher taking attendance, with the flattest affect possible? Do you look up to make eye contact or look at the words continuously so as not to lose your place?

We talked about whether the Sunday readings are for learning and study or for edification and exhortation.

We talked about how to listen to the readings. For example, the presider should model listening by looking at the reader rather than busily looking at the worship plan. Should we read along with the words or simply use our ears to hear the reading? When we read along, our brains switch into matching the words we are reading to what we are hearing, while deprioritizing comprehension. Simply listening is ideal. And yet making the readings accessible for those who are hard of hearing is important as well.

And then there are deeper questions about what the readings are for. We tend to think the Word portion of worship is like a Bible study where we learn about each reading. Yet, cramming in a deeper understanding of all four readings each week is a lot to ask in the seven or eight minutes we spend hearing the Word. Similarly, shifting to a system like the Narrative Lectionary is a challenge because it disconnects the readings from the larger liturgical calendar and the ways in which in each Sunday’s set of readings support one another to tell the narrative of each season.

More and more I am coming to the view that it takes a certain kind of skill and attention to hear the Word in worship. Rather than following closely, word matching or studying the Word as if for a test, hearing Scripture in worship is something like going to the symphony.

At the symphony, there might be a lecture on the music before the concert. There might be things about the history of the music to learn at home. But in the moment, during the concert, we listen attentively. We let the music wash over us catching the emotion, the harmonies and dissonance that evoke different responses or feelings within us.

Similarly when hearing the Word in worship, we listen best to whatever words inspire or comfort, challenge or compel. We listen for things that God might be saying to us in that moment, and then we let the readings go, as we contemplate what message the Spirit has gifted us with.

At least for me, this has been a change in how I hear the Word and how I have found myself connected with the readings. I invite you to try it, too. Don’t worry if you remember the story from Sunday school, or whether you know anything about the prophet whose book the reading is from or about which letter of Paul’s the reading is from. Just let the Word of God wash over you as you would a beautiful symphony, and see what God might be saying to you this week.

Sermon, Theology & Culture

The symbol of the Ashes still matters – an Ash Wednesday Sermon

February 22, 2023 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

GOSPEL: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Jesus said to the disciples:] 1“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven….

The ashy cross smeared onto a forehead on Ash Wednesday still holds a place of symbolic meaning in our world. You may have already seen a few folks out and about today bearing their ashes still on their foreheads. You might see some TV personalities who will wear their ashes on their news programs or late night variety shows. Today is that day when Christians can be seen out in the world with that black smudge on their faces, a visible sign that they have been to church in the middle of the week as Lent begins.

Just a few days ago we were up on the mountain of Transfiguration, followed by the mountain that is our Annual Meeting. Places and moments to look around and survey the world around us, to see the paths that we have travelled and hopefully see the route of the journey ahead.

But as Jesus and the disciples and us come down from that mountain top moment, we enter back into the fray of the valley and we soon encounter the symbol of the Ashes.

The Ashes that are imposed on our foreheads and their meaning transcend time and space. Even without knowing much about Ash Wednesday or Church or Christianity, the image of an ash marked face seems to say something profound, something important. Something about impermanence and mortality, something about our limits and our finite nature, something about just how we live lives that constantly run parallel to death.

Ash Wednesday not only reminds us of our mortality, but reminds us that death takes many shapes in our lives. From the small deaths of sin, conflict, division, suffering and strife to the way death is imposed our on emotions, our bodies and very beings.

In this way, there is a discomfort that comes with Ash Wednesday. We work so hard to avoid thinking about and considering our own mortality. We strive to sanitize death, to make it clinical and distant and remote, very unlike the meshy smudge of ashes that will be stamped onto our foreheads tonight. We want to keep death far from our minds and experience for as long as we can.

For many of the funerals that I did early on as a pastor, funeral directors would come prepared for the committals at the grave. They would often bring vials of sand for the moment when I would commend the deceased to the ground saying, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” As I said the portion of the prayer of committal, I would mark the casket with the cross with the sand. The little metal vial would make it easy to produce a cross in sand as it poured evenly onto the caskets. It was the correct liturgical action, yet it seemed careful and contained. The symbol was muted by the neatness.

In more recent years as graveside committals have become more rare, funeral directors have mostly stopped bringing the vials of sand. So I have been required to go back to the traditional means for marking caskets with the symbol of the cross – I have been using dirt. Dirt from the grave itself, usually piled nearby under a green turf carpet attempting to hide the fact that this grave is a hole in the ground.

The symbol changes when you go from holding a carefully filled vial of sand to grabbing a handful of dirt and marking a clumpy cross on a casket. The sand usually blended into the finished wood the casket, while the dirt feel like dumping a handful of soil onto a carefully set dinning room table. The dirt doesn’t feel like it belongs. And yet as the words are said, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” it becomes a proclamation of defiance. Defiance against our attempts to contain death, to keep ourselves detached and removed from the messiness of death. Caskets and graves are not little condos in the ground, but in that moment we are returning a person, a loved one to the impermanent and mortal place from where we were created.

Dropping those clumps of dirt on caskets and marking foreheads with wispy palm ashes are moments that go hand in hand. Symbols that say something more than words about them can, they are the very thing from where we come from and to where we return. As God took the dirt and formed the Adam – the dirt creature in Hebrew – God brought human beings into existence. Our bodies are destined to return to the same dirt and mud, the same dust and ash. And as we make that proclamation at Funerals and on Ash Wednesday, the dirt and the ashes bring us close where we came from and to where we return.

And yet, the ashes aren’t just reminders of our mortality, they aren’t just the embodiment of our fragility and finitude.

The ashes remind us that the God who first created life out of the mud and earth, dust and ash has now taken on our flesh, our dusty finite flesh. And in that earthy flesh destined to die, God will do again what God did in the beginning. From the ashy cross and the dusty grave, God will breath life in to these earthy bodies of ours. Even from the ash that we bear tonight, even from the clumps of dirt that will be place on our graves, God will create new and resurrected life.

And so on this first step into the season of Lent, on this night of Ashes, we also are reminded of God’s promises made to the Adam, made again in the waters of Baptism, reinforced tonight and kept at the end – Remember that you are dust and even in the dust there is life.

Sermon, Theology & Culture

The End of Advent and the Beginning of Christmas – A Christmas Day Sermon

December 25, 2022 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

John 1:1-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…

And the Word became flesh.

This morning, on this feast of the nativity, we have made a long journey to be here.

Through the dark places, searching for the light. We have journeyed through Advent. We draped our sanctuary and our selves in the deep and rich blues of Advent, we let our eyes adjust to the dark until the distant starlight began to peek through the darkness. Our Advent waiting and wondering led to this moment of celebration at the birth of Christ.

We began 5 Sundays ago with Jesus announcing the end of time, imploring us to Keep Awake. To open our eyes to the world around us.

We continued on with John the Baptist, who was preaching in the dark wilderness to “Prepare the way of the Lord,” the Lord who will come to straighten our crooked paths.

We then followed John to prison, to the dark night of the soul, wondering if all these promises of the Messiah were in fact true.

And finally, last week, we heard the announcement. Mary would bear a child named Jesus. And our darkness, the darkness of the entire cosmos was placed in contrast to the tiny baby growing in one young woman’s womb… and we wondered if this indeed was God’s plan to push the darkness back and keep it at bay. To bring light, THE LIGHT of GOD, into the world through a tiny baby born to insignificant people in a forgotten corner of the world.

And then last night, we walked with Joseph and Mary across country, to the town of David called Bethlehem. We submitted to the Emporer’s decree to be registered, we were denied place to rest our heads, we squatted like refugees in animal barns, we heard the angels with the outcasts and we found out that God was indeed born into our dark world, bringing real light.

We also discovered, that this 2000 year old story is a story for 2022. That if Jesus was born into a world full of darkness back then, one where tyrants ruled, soldiers killed, people lived in fear, that certainly the darkness of our world is not too much for God. That Jesus does come into our darkness too. Messiah is born today, just as 2000 years ago.

But today, the Gospel of John pulls us back from the details of the story. John gives us the Christmas story again, but without shepherds and angels, barns and journeys, without even Mary or Jospeh.

John takes us to the heart, to the meat of the story.

And the word became flesh.

John’s story of incarnation is hardly one we could reproduce with a Sunday School pageant. John expects that we can separate the details of the story from the meaning of the story. What does it mean that the God of all creation has chosen to become incarnate?

Incarnation is one of those churchy words that pastors tend use, but that actually has a very earthy meaning.

The flower with a similar name, carnation, gets its name from its fleshy colour.

Carnivale, the South American Mardi Gras festival is related to incarnation too. The great festival where you eat all the meat in the house before fasting during lent.

And carnivore, the scientific word for meat eater.

Carne means meat.

So that church word incarnation literally means”to take on meat.”

And the Word became flesh.

The birth of Christ is the moment when God puts on the meat of humanity, the flesh of our bodies. If you want to know what God looks like, look at the people around you, look at their skin and eyes and hair. When Mary and Joseph and those Shepherds looked into the eyes, of the christ child, they would have seen there all of humanity contained in flesh.

When the disciples and the crowds heard his voice, they would have heard the voice of the God.

When the lepers and the lame and blind were touched and healed by Jesus, they would have felt the touch of God.

When the soldiers nailed feet and hands to a cross, they would have pierced the Body of Christ.

But putting on our meat isn’t just about our physical bodies.

The incarnation is also how God puts on the flesh of our humanity. The darkness of sin and suffering and death. The flesh of the human condition, of limited, fragile creation. God takes on what it means to be human, to be created, to be us.

John’s Christmas story omits all the details that we tend to think the story is all about in order to bring us to heart or the meat of the matter. God has taken on our flesh in order to bridge the unbridgeable gap between God and a fallen, broken creation. God has become one of us in order to come near to all of us.

Sure, John’s version of the Christmas story might be missing a few of the familiar parts of the story, but fleshiness of the story, of the incarnation reminds us that of all the Christmas traditions we hold this time of year, the most true of them all is the one carry on with week after week. In the Eucharist as we share in bread and wine, we partake in God’s fleshiness. And we are reminded again and again that God takes on our flesh AND we take on God’s. That God’s light and life comes near to us again and again. Given and shed for us.

And as God comes near, as God becomes incarnate, God begins to reveal the light that has been missing from our world. We begin to see just how pervasive the darkness was. We begin to see that even the smallest bit of real light coming into life through a young woman giving birth in a barn is more light than we can handle. We begin to see that God comes and comes in small space, because even the smallest light pushes the darkness away, but the darkness can never diminish even the smallest amount of light.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

As we began in Advent seeing the dark places of the world, making our way from the end of the world backwards to the beginning, to the announcement of the coming Messiah, to going with Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem and with angels to shepherds, John tells us that our destination was here. Here with the Word in the beginning. Christmas is where God begins creation anew.

Christmas begins all things new, because the darkness of sin and death will no longer have hold over us. Because the old order of things has ended, and now the Christ born into flesh has come today.

Christmas according to John might not have all the details we think are normally part of the story, but John does take us to the heart, to the meat of the matter. John strips the details back to open ears to hear, our eyes to see, our hearts to know that this story of a babe being born to virgin in a stable in Bethlehem, is the story of God coming into our world, coming in order to be near to us again.

Hear John’s final line in the Christmas story again:

Today, the Word becomes flesh and lives among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Sermon, Theology & Culture

Do Not Be Afraid that Christmas isn’t what you expect – A Christmas Eve Sermon

December 25, 2022 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered….

You may be expecting a story tonight.

For the past three years, the first here in person and then the past two years online, I have told stories, modern versions of the Christmas story. However, tonight will be a bit different. Rather than something that sounds like a Vinyl Cafe story, we are going to tell and hear the Christmas story with new ears to year and new eyes to see. As the angels said to the Shepherds:

Do not be afraid; for see– I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people

2022 has been another rough year in a succession of rough years. In the fall of 2021, we were heading into 2022 hoping that it would be finally a relief from pandemic and a return to normalcy. Instead we got more pandemic, and then war in Ukraine and not long after refugees landing in our homes and neighbourhoods, there were convoys and debates over public health measures, there were supply chain issues, rising price of gas and inflation. It feels like we have been battered by one thing after another this year.

As we arrive at Christmas this year, we are reeling from all we have lived through again this year and stumbling into what comes next.

So maybe for you Christmas is just the same old, same old time for family, traditions and memories this year.

But it is probably NOT the case that for most of us. Christmas may be lacking something this year. It feels a little more like a struggle than it is supposed to. The magic just isn’t there for all the reasons that these past years have been so difficult.

And we think that Christmas is supposed to have that special quality, that feeling of being different than the normal and mundane things of every day life. Christmas is supposed to lift our spirits, remind us of better things, be a time for sentimentalism and warm fuzzies. It is like that Christmas Card with Mary gazing lovingly down at newborn Jesus – it should melt our hearts. It should feel like that special moment when we all sing silent night to candlelight, – glowing faces all around.

But this year it hasn’t been those things. Maybe tonight was supposed to be the chance to reclaim what Christmas is supposed to be… And certainly being here in person for the first time since 2019 is wonderful…. But it isn’t the same, it is NOT just picking up from the world of 2019 as if the past two years haven’t happened.

But here is the thing about all of that.

The Christmas story that we know, the one that goes along with silent night, kids dressed up in cute costumes for the pageant, family traditions waiting at home and presents under the tree… that isn’t exactly the real version of Christmas either.

All the nostalgia is less about Christmas than we think. In fact, all those things that we listed earlier that made 2022 such a hard year… they speak more to Christmas than we know.

When we hear that familiar story from Luke that we just read… it is easy to imagine the Christmas pageant or TV version.

But the very first line of story takes us to something a little more 2022 than we might be comfortable with.

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.”

Today, we know what it is to have our political leaders make declarations that turn our life upside down. Whether it is soldiers marching across borders into neighbouring countries, or central banks increasing interest rates, or public health orders affecting how we work, study or travel.

Mary and Joseph too had no choice but to get up and go, when ordered by the empire. Baby on the way or not, inconvenient to life or not – their lives were thrown into chaos by the order of the Emperor.

Today, we bear witness to poverty around the world and here in our streets, on the TV and in our bus shelters. Mary and Joseph too had no safe place to stay. No safe place to give birth, but rather the part of a house or cave used to shelter the animals. This is where the mother of God was forced to give birth.

Then once the ordeal of child birth is over, a gang of Shepherds showed up. Not the cute ones wearing bathrobes that we imagine. But shepherds who were the dregs of society, more like drug dealers and addicts, not good and polite neighbours bringing casseroles, not well meaning aunts who stop by the hospital with flowers. Rather is was misfits and riff riff who are the first to worship this newborn child.

Today, we know the stories of violence against women and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Mary is a teenage mom with an older man looking after her and her child despite not being the baby’s father. Jesus is born into the kind of situation where would we expect child and family services to intervene. Yet, this is the family that God chooses to care for the Messiah.

Once the baby is born and somehow the holy family has survived everything…Mary and Joseph are left on their own, left to escape corrupt Kings and authoritarian regimes all by themselves.

None of this sounds like the familiar Christmas, does it?

Except this IS the Christmas story.

And it is IMPORTANT that this IS the Christmas story.

Because the warm fuzzy version is not what our world needs. The shopping and carols and movies and lights strung up might make us feel good, they may even bring a certain joy and hope to our dark December…. but the TV version of the Christmas story will not save the world. It will not save us from all the things we need saving from.

Instead in Mary and Joseph’s story we can connect to elements of our own, that we can see the ways in which our world has not changed.

This fact means that if God can be born to a teen mom and a step dad in 1st century occupied Israel, surely God can be born in our world.

That Jesus is found in families fleeing Roman or Russian soldiers.

That Jesus is found in Bethlehem mangers and Winnipeg bus shelters.

That the holy family is found in those struggling to put food on the table, struggling to afford Christmas presents, struggling to just hold it all together when this supposed to be the happiest time of the year.

As much as we want the magic of Christmas,

The world needs the Messiah to be born,

The Christ who is willing to go and be found in real Christmas places.

God in Christ is willing to be born among us in order that we can see that God has come near. Near to us in the ways and places that we need most. God comes near, God joins in creation, taking on our flesh to show us that we are not left alone to sort out this crazy world. That we go into the night with God along side us, that God is facing the dangers with us, that surviving our world, that confronting sin and death is precisely where God is with us.

2022 might not feel much like Christmas as we know it, but it just might be the closest to the first Christmas we have ever been.

The story that we tell tonight is so much bigger and so much deeper than the feelings we try to recreate at this time of year. The real Christmas story, the real story of Jesus’s birth in our world is about all the feelings that we don’t want to have this time of year. It is about the fact that God comes to into a world that needs joy and hope and light.

So just as those Angels proclaimed: Do not be afraid.

Do not be afraid if Christmas doesn’t feel like we think if should this year…. because it is precisely into this world of ours full of difficulty, hardship and struggle that Jesus is born. Born in the city of David, born here among us this night.