“Out of the Depths” (Psalm 130)

This past week, the news media had about all they could handle with the G-7 summit in Quebec, the Ontario election, the Washington Capitals’ win of the Stanley Cup and the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. But all those stories were quickly overshadowed by two others—the deaths of two of the world’s most highly successful people: Kate Spade, whose handbag designs became a multi-million dollar business, and Anthony Bourdain, the travelling gourmet, whose books and TV shows have enjoyed almost universal popularity for the past two decades.

Tragically both deaths were by suicide and they served to underline a growing concern among health professionals. It is the rising rate of suicide in our society today. According to a recent article in USA Today that rate has risen by nearly thirty percent in the past two decades. Among middle-aged men the increase is even more alarming at forty-three percent. As I look at these statistics, I am forced to ask myself, what is it that makes life for some people so bleak that there is nothing left to live for? What has entrapped them to such an extreme that they are not able to see any other way out than to end it all?

The psalm that we read a few moments ago begins with the lament, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord…” The words express the desperation of a person who is drowning. They are not unlike those we hear from the lips of the prophet Jonah as he languished in the belly of the great fish: “In my distress I called to the Lord… From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help…” (Jonah 2:2). Life has carried him far beyond the point where he can any longer contemplate helping himself. All he can do is shout for dear life and hope that someone will hear him and come to his rescue. Tragically there are some people for whom that is not an option. They feel they are caught in a swirling vortex that will drag them down only deeper and deeper.

There are seven accounts of suicide in the Bible, six of them in the Old Testament. Probably the best known, though, is that of Judas Iscariot. In remorse over the horror of what he had done in betraying Jesus to the authorities, he went out and hanged himself. And while the apostle Paul likely did not have Judas in mind, I believe his words to the Corinthians have something to say here. He writes about a godly sorrow that leads to repentance and contrasts it with a worldly sorrow that leads to death (2 Corinthians 7:10).

Well, where does all that bring us this morning? If my own experience is anything to go by, then there are times when most of us find ourselves “in the depths”. Sometimes the depths in which we find ourselves are the result of circumstances beyond our control—a severe illness, a long period of severe strain, an impossible situation at work or at school, a tragedy of one kind or another, a bereavement… And sometimes those depths are of our own making. I believe this morning’s psalm has something to say to each of us when we find ourselves in the depths, no matter what it was that landed us there.

I cry

The psalmist’s opening words (as you have probably already observed) are an expression of desperation. Listen to how Eugene Peterson renders them in The Message:

Help, God—the bottom has fallen out of my life!
     Master, hear my cry for help!
Listen hard! Open your ears!
     Listen to my cries for mercy.

It may not seem apparent at first, but hidden beneath the psalmist’s anguish there lies a conviction, that while his situation may be desperate, he still has one upon whom he can call for help. He is not alone.

I recently listened to a radio interview with Kate Bowler. She is a professor at Duke University Divinity School in North Carolina. Married to her high school sweetheart and with a two year-old child, she was given the news that she had stage-four incurable cancer of the bowel. I cannot begin to imagine what a devastating blow that must have been for her. Yet here is what she said:

I gave up most of the spiritual clichés, I think—that every good thing was going to come back to me or that I could be, you know, the architect of my own life. But one of the only certainties I actually truly latched onto was the sense that in the worst moments that there can be an unbidden God and that I don’t have to earn it. And I don’t even have to like worry that I won’t have it—but that maybe the hope is that when we come to the end of ourselves, that we’re not alone.[1]

“The hope is that when we come to the end of ourselves, we’re not alone.” The hope that Kate Bowler cherishes in her soul is the same hope that enabled the psalmist to cry out from the depths. It is the hope in a God who is with us, no matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how high the flood.

Do not fear, [that same God says elsewhere through Isaiah]
     for I have redeemed you;
     I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
     I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
     they will not sweep over you…
Do not be afraid, for I am with you. (Isaiah 43:2,5)

More than that, the psalmist can rely on the God who is with him because that same God is a God of mercy. Underlying all the history of Israel and underlying the psalmist’s faith is the conviction that the God to whom he prays is the same one who revealed himself to Moses amid the cloud and thunder of Sinai as “the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Exodus 34:6-7).

In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer there is a beautiful prayer that runs like this: “We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” Like the psalmist we can come to God in the confidence that no matter what the circumstances he is with us and that he is a God of mercy.

I wait

And so the psalmist prays. And he waits. According to my Hebrew dictionary, the verb he uses here means “to wait or to look for with eager expectation”. And if that were not enough, the psalmist tells us that that is exactly what he means: “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits…” Then he goes on to give us the most beautiful picture:

My soul waits for the Lord
     more than watchmen for the morning,
     more than watchmen for the morning.

Can’t you just picture it? The sentinel has been on the ramparts all night long. Rumours have been rising that an enemy is on the approach. What was that noise in the bushes? He strains his eyes to look out through the darkness of the surrounding countryside. His fingers grow numb in the frostiness of the chill night air. Then over the horizon there appears the first glimmer of dawn’s light signaling a new day. And the fears brought on by the shadows and the strange sounds of the night begin to melt away.

In the same way there will be times, seasons of our life when we find ourselves waiting—and sometimes with deep anxiety. But that does not mean that we are doing nothing. The Bible does not equate waiting with idleness. Those of you who know your Bibles well will recall that the apostle Paul had some rather harsh words for those who used waiting for the Lord as an excuse for laziness. His advice instead: “Never tire of doing good.” (2 Thessalonians 3:13)

Besides this, I do believe that in those times of waiting (and indeed in times of suffering) the Lord can come to us in ways that we may never have anticipated and give us strengths that we never knew were there. I have seen it again and again in the lives of my parishioners. At times when I have sought to bring them comfort, I find that they already have a strength that is far beyond anything I can offer. I never cease to find encouragement in the words of Isaiah:

Do you not know?
     Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
     and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
     and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
     and young men stumble and fall;
but those who wait for the Lord
     will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
     they will run and not grow weary,
     they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:28-31)

I hope

So it is that the psalmist says, “Put your hope in the Lord.” Notice that he does not say what to hope for. Rather, it is whom to hope in. And between the two there is a world of difference.

Somehow it seems to me that what this psalm is saying is that when we find ourselves caught in the depths, we do not control the outcome. Ultimately we are confronted with our own powerlessness. No doubt we have a preferred way in which we would like things to end up. But we cannot dictate that to God. We can only place ourselves in his hands in the faith that he is a God of mercy who loves us more than we could ever imagine. Allow me to give the final word to Kate Bowler:

Cancer has kicked down the walls of my life… But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive… Everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.[2]

I would love to trade the life I have for one in which I imagined I could always spend it with my husband and my son. But it did feel like cancer was like this secret key that opened up this whole new reality. And part of the reality was the realization that your own pain connects you to the pain of other people. I don’t know. Maybe I was just a narcissist before. But like all of a sudden, I realized how incredibly fragile life is for almost everyone. And then I noticed things like—and that felt like a spiritual—I don’t know—like gift.

It’s like you notice the tired mom in the grocery store who’s just like struggling to get the thing off the top shelf while her kid screams, and you notice how very tired that person looks at the bus stop. And then, of course, all the people in the cancer clinic around me. That felt like I was cracked open, and I could see everything really clearly for the first time. And the other bit was not feeling nearly as angry as I thought I would. And, I mean, granted—like I have been pretty angry at times. But it was mostly that I felt God’s presence. And it was less like, here are some important spiritual truths I know intellectually about God. There are four of them. I have a PowerPoint presentation. It was instead more like the way you’d feel a friend or like someone holding you. I just didn’t feel quite as scared. I just felt loved.[3]

Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
     for with the Lord is unfailing love
     and with him is full redemption.

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[1]     NPR interview, 12 Feb 2018 https://www.npr.org/2018/02/12/585066841/a-stage-4-cancer-patient-shares-the-pain-and-clarity-of-living-scan-to-scan

[2]     “Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me”, The New York Times, 13 Feb 2016 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/death-the-prosperity-gospel-and-me.html?smid=tw-share

[3]     NPR interview, 12 Feb 2018

“Welcome Dave!” (1 Corinthians 1:26 – 2:5)

A sermon preached at the Installation of the Rev. David Mowers as Rector of Trinity Church, Baraboo, Wisconsin 

I have to admit I was a little tickled when your new rector informed me that, because it is St Matthias’ Day in the church calendar, one of the readings for the service this morning was to be about the choosing of Matthias as the twelfth apostle to fill the space left by Judas Iscariot. In one sense it is a most appropriate reading for the present occasion. After all, this service is a celebration of your choosing a new rector to serve in your parish. However, I rather doubt that you used the same method as the apostles did in going for Matthias. And on the slim chance that you did, you’re probably not going to admit it when the bishop is present!

My own theory about the passage (for whatever it’s worth) is that both candidates, Joseph and Matthias, were equally suited, equally qualified, equally gifted for the position. The little church in Jerusalem was in an enviable position. Good rectors are not always easy to come by—and I am sure that the members of your search committee worked and searched and prayed hard before they found the young man who stands before you this morning. And let me add from my own experience over a number of years (and as I suspect you yourselves have already begun to recognize) you have found a man of excellence.

So we’ll leave Matthias aside for now, because I suspect the other passages that we have read from the Bible this morning are Dave’s choice—and if we look at them we may find some clues about the kind of ministry he is going to have among you and in which I have no doubt he will want you to become engaged.

Consider your call…

In the reading from 1 Corinthians Paul is writing to the Christian community in a busy port and commercial center on the Mediterranean Sea near the southern tip of Greece. Unlike this church, which has ministered in Baraboo for more than 160 years, the church in Corinth was still in the toddler stage. It had been founded by Paul himself during his second missionary journey, just four years or so before he wrote the letter from which we have just read. So you can imagine the level of esteem in which some of those parishioners held Paul. There were some, in fact, who were proud to claim, “I’m one of Paul’s followers.”

It was a claim that horrified Paul, for it is a constant temptation to slip into the habit of focusing the ministry of the Christian community in one person. It happened in the first century and it happens in the twenty-first. In one church where I served there were some people who still looked back longingly to the rector who had gone there in 1897! But Paul turns the tables around in the opening words of this morning’s reading: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters…”

Now I can imagine what probably went through the minds of those people as these words were first read to them. “My call?” “But I don’t have a theological degree.” “I can’t get up in a pulpit and preach.” “I wouldn’t know how to counsel anybody.” And on and on the list goes. But Paul pulls the rug out from under all of that. Look how he describes the Corinthian church: “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.”

And this was nothing new. Think of Jesus’ followers. They were a ragtag group if ever there was one: a handful of fishermen, a tax collector (considered a turncoat by the locals), a radical freedom fighter, and on the list goes—including even one who would later betray him. They were constantly arguing with one another. They repeatedly missed the point of Jesus’ parables and miracles. They cowered in a locked room after he was crucified. Yet these were the ones who very soon would be turning the world upside down!

The point is that Jesus isn’t looking for superstars. He’s looking for women and men who are simply willing to live their lives in faithfulness to him.

Today, as you officially welcome Dave Mowers as your rector, you are giving recognition to the fact that you are on a journey together. The church has often been likened to a ship. It’s why we call the area where you are sitting the nave. But it’s not a luxury cruiser. It’s more like the ships that the Romans used to conquer the Mediterranean world, strenuously rowed by hundreds of men in the lower decks. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Ben Hur, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) The maneuverability of those ships depended on every oarsman pulling his weight. So too the mission of the church depends on each and every of us living in full and wholehearted response to God’s call in Jesus Christ.

When I came to you…

It is only after challenging the members of the Corinthian church to fulfill their calling that Paul goes on to write about his own. He tells them that he didn’t make any attempt to win them over by what one translator renders as “polished speeches and the latest philosophy”.[1] Perhaps Paul had learned from his experience in Athens, where that approach had been a bit of a flop only a few days before! And that in turn may also have been why he came to them “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling”.

Whatever the case, the sacred ministry is a solemn and awesome responsibility. I had that impressed on me at my ordination as a priest. We were still using the “old” Book of Common Prayer at the time, from which the bishop said to me,

Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his spouse and his body… Wherefore consider with yourselves the end of your ministry towards the children of God, towards the spouse and body of Christ; and see that you never cease your labour, your care and diligence, until you have done all that lieth in you…[2]

I remember years later sitting down behind my desk on my first day in a new parish and dialing my predecessor on the telephone. “How are you doing?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “probably just like you. I’m sitting here feeling utterly incompetent.” We clergy may put on a veneer of bravado, but I believe the best of us recognize deep within ourselves that we are unequal to the task that has been committed to us.

It was for that reason Paul made a resolution that in both word and action he would seek to point to Jesus Christ and to him alone—and that he would do it not by falling back on his substantial rabbinical and academic training but by surrendering completely to the Holy Spirit. Now that does not mean that Paul flew by the seat of his pants. (I’ve seen preachers that do that and it doesn’t work!) No, it meant that everything he did was bathed in prayer.

I believe that in calling David Mowers to the ministry of word and sacrament in this parish you have invited into your midst a remarkable man with remarkable gifts. He has a deep commitment to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and he has a deep love for the church. He is a preacher of extraordinary ability. He is a leader and a man of vision. He is gifted with a fine intellect and reads deeply and broadly. But none of that will come to any fruition unless it is enlivened and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And by the way, you may disagree with him about which baseball team to root for, but don’t let that stand in the way of coming alongside him and praying for the power and blessing of the Holy Spirit both upon him and upon your ministry together.

… So that your faith might rest on the power of God

Now all of this has a purpose. And that purpose, says Paul, is “that your faith might rest on the power of God”. There is always the temptation to put our faith in other things: in church programs, in budgets, in traditions, or whatever. I suspect our particular Episcopal inclination is to put our faith in thinking that we’re the only ones who know how to do it right, whether it’s our social justice agenda or just the fact that we seem to be the only ones who know better than to sing Christmas carols in Advent or Alleluias in Lent!

I remember hearing the story of a Chinese pastor visiting a group of pastors in our part of the world. He told them how in his church there were no hymnbooks, no computers, no budget, indeed not even a building. The pastors expressed their amazement that a church could function, much less thrive, without all these seemingly necessary tools. To which he replied, “And I am amazed at how your churches are able to continue without relying on the power of God!”

In this morning’s gospel reading we heard the story of those two downhearted men drearily making their way along the seven-and-half-mile walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Their hopes, their dreams, their whole world had crashed down upon them with the sight of Jesus hanging lifeless on the cross. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they confessed to the mysterious stranger who had joined them along the journey. It was not all that much later that they were staring at each other in amazement and stuttering, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the Scriptures to us?”

They realized that they had been in the presence of Jesus. Surely that’s the kind of thing Paul is getting at in this morning’s reading when he writes about “a demonstration of the Spirit” and about a faith that rests on the power of God. By his preaching and teaching, in his ministration of the sacraments, in his daily prayer and conversation, and above all by his life and character, Dave’s job is to help you live in the power of the Holy Spirit. He is here to help you discover Jesus as a present reality—as the one who has died and yet is alive forevermore.

There is no doubt in my mind that your search committee and your bishop were led by God to bring Dave Mowers to serve in this parish. And my prayer for you as you officially embark on this journey together is that you may indeed find your hearts burning within you, that you may know the daily presence of Jesus in your lives and in your midst, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may be bearers of his grace and his good news to a needy world.

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[1]     Eugene Peterson, The Message

[2]     The Book of Common Prayer, Canada, 1962, page 649

“The Way of Mercy” (Psalm 67)

Ever had the feeling you’d bitten off more than you could chew? Well, that’s exactly the sense that began to come upon me as I got more and more deeply into preparing my sermon this week. It was my intention to focus on Psalm 67, a psalm I committed to memory years ago in the old-fashioned idiom of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

God be merciful unto us, and bless us;
     and show us the light of his countenance…
That thy way may be known upon earth,
     thy saving health among all nations.

When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago in the New International Version (the translation in our pew Bibles), I found these words:

May God be gracious to us and bless us
     and make his face shine on us…

It’s not that different, except that the word “merciful” has become “gracious”. In fact, virtually every English translation since 1952 has dome the same thing, substituted that word “gracious” in place of “merciful”. This whetted my curiosity. And so a few clicks on biblegateway.com revealed that, while the words “mercy” and “merciful” occur 310 times in the King James Version of the Bible, they are to be found only 144 times in the New International Version. Why the change?

First of all, there are half a dozen words in each of the languages of the Old and New Testaments that can be translated “mercy” and each one has a different shade of meaning. There is one that carries the notion of “faithful devotion” and is often translated “loving kindness”. “I will sing of the Lord’s mercies forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations” (Psalm 89:1). The word that is used in our psalm this morning has been defined as “the gracious favour of the superior to the inferior, all undeserved”.[1] A third term in the Old Testament is related to the word for “womb” and so has the meaning of “motherly care” or “tender love”. It is the word the psalmist uses when he prays, “Surround me with your tender mercies so I may live” (Psalm 119:77).

When we come to the New Testament there are again three words that are often translated “mercy”. The first simply means kindness: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). “If your gift is to show mercy, do it cheerfully” (Romans 12:8). “Mercy triumphs over judgement” (James 2:13). There is a second word that means “compassion”. Thus Paul exhorts the Christians at Rome, “I urge you …, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,” (Romans 12:1) and James declares, “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy” (James 5:11). But the most colourful term in the New Testament really means “bowels”—suggesting that we’re talking about a powerful emotion that comes from deep within. It’s the word that the desperate father uses when he comes to Jesus imploring him on behalf of his epileptic son: “If you can do anything, have mercy on us and help us” (Mark 9:22). And on more than one occasion, when Jesus saw the crowds that gathered around him and their neediness, the gospels use that same word. Today we might easily say, “Jesus’ heart went out to them” (Mark 6:34, 14:14).

The Nature of Mercy

My suspicion is that our contemporary Bible translators have moved away from that word mercy because in today’s world it has taken on negative implications. For many people “mercy” has become one of those outmoded words like “charity”. For them it carries with it a sense of condescension, of pity. While claiming to help, in reality it demeans its recipients, who end up being beholden to the one who bestows it. But that is certainly not the mercy that we find in the Bible or in the psalm we read this morning.

One of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry is that it often takes the form of a series of parallel statements, in which one phrase amplifies or enhances the one that precedes it. And this is what we see in Psalm 67:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us.

One of the things I’ve always loved to do on a hot summer day is to go body surfing. I stand out in the water up to my waist and a little wavelet passes by. Then there’s slightly larger one that wets me a little higher. And that is followed by a great rolling wave. I plunge in front of it and it carries me right into the shore. It seems to me the same is happening in this opening verse. It’s a kind of crescendo. May God be merciful to us; may God bless us; may God smile upon us. Each phrase builds on the previous one until it carries us like a wave into the shore.

You see, mercy is not about sparingly dispensing something when people beg for it. It’s not as though God grudgingly bestows his mercy only when we plead to him long enough and desperately enough. (Do you remember the story Jesus told about the persistent widow who pleaded her case before the unjust judge? The whole point of that parable is that God is not like that.) No, we have a God who desires nothing more than to show mercy. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort …,” writes the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 1:3). “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,” echoes James (5:11). “His mercies never come to an end,” sings Jeremiah, “they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

And so mercy is about abundance. It is about generosity. It is about the lavishness of grace. It is about a shepherd who leaves his ninety-nine sheep in the fold to go in search of the one that is lost. It is about a father who kills the fatted calf for his errant son and runs down the road to embrace him. It is about a God who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.

The Need for Mercy

The tragedy is that that kind of mercy is a rare commodity in our world today. You can see the evidence of its disappearance in the social media on a daily basis. How quick people are to become judge, jury and executioner often on the slimmest of evidence! They hide behind the anonymity of the internet to lash out with torrents of insults and invective, with the result that whole lives have been ruined through unsubstantiated defamations. And then there is road rage, where a forgetful moment behind the wheel on the part of one driver can lead to unbridled fury on the part of another.

Lest we think that we in the church are immune, let me tell you a little story from Don Posterski, who used to be vice-president of World Vision Canada. His position often involved travel and therefore eating in restaurants. He tells of how he would occasionally ask the wait staff what were their best and worst times of the week. Almost invariably the answer would be Sunday lunch. Why? Because that was when they received the lowest tips. And who makes up a significant proportion of Sunday diners at restaurants? Churchgoers. Sadly we have gained a reputation among at least one segment of the population of being stingy and thankless. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to turn that around when you consider that a five percent difference on a tip in most cases doesn’t amount to more than a dollar or two.

How transforming it would be if we who claim to be followers of Jesus could recapture the Bible’s vision of God’s mercy! And it seems to me the only way we can do that is to pursue it, to experience it, to cast ourselves upon it, on a daily basis ourselves. New Testament scholar Tom Wright has written, “The church is never more in danger than when it … forgets that every day it too must say, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner,’ and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility… ”[2]

Wright is echoing one of the earliest of Christian prayers: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is known by many as “the Jesus prayer” and is prayed repeatedly by believers in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Of this prayer Franciscan writer Richard Rohr comments,

This is not a self-demeaning prayer, nor a self-defeating prayer, nor is it a disempowering prayer. Relying upon mercy, in fact, protects you from the arrogance and pride that wants to judge others, even in your mind. It situates you in freedom from any sense of your own sufficiency or superiority, and affirms a non-need to justify yourself, and thus keeps your heart open for others and for God. It is basically a prayer for detachment from the self, both mind and heart, and its endless games of self-validation. “Lord, have mercy” seeks validation only from God and not from any inner or outer attempts to be worthy, independently “good”, or not-in-need-of-mercy.[3]

The Fruit of Mercy

Before we close, there is another aspect of God’s mercy that we find in Psalm 67 and that we cannot overlook. I spoke of God’s mercy being like a wave that washes over us. One of the things about that wave is that it doesn’t stop with me. It continues to surge forward until it reaches the shore. So too, God’s mercy does not stop with us. Look at the psalm again:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
     and make his face to shine upon us—
that your ways may be known on earth,
     your saving power among all nations.

In fact apart from the first verse the focus of the entire of the psalm is not on “us” but on “them”: “Let the peoples praise you…” “Let the nations be glad…” “Let all the ends of the earth revere him.” God shows mercy to us so that we in turn may show that same mercy to others. And if we didn’t hear that message in the psalm, it certainly comes through loud and clear in Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant.

Do you remember the story he told about the king who thought it was time to settle accounts with his servants? As it turned out, one of them owed him an incalculable debt, far more than he could ever hope to pay in several lifetimes, so the king ordered that he and all his family be sold into slavery. When the servant got wind of this, he threw himself face down before the king and begged, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” Jesus tells us the master had mercy on him and cancelled the debt. No sooner had he left the king’s presence, however, than he sought out one of his fellow servants who owed him what was by comparison a trifling amount. He grabbed him by the throat and shook him and demanded, “Pay back what you owe me!” In response his fellow servant pleaded with him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” But he refused and had the man thrown into debtors’ prison. When the king heard about this, he was enraged and said to the servant, “You wicked servant! I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” And with that he handed him over to the jailers.

The point of the parable is that that is the way it is with God’s mercy. He does not intend it to end with us, but to flow out from us, to bring freshness, renewal, joy and hope into the lives of others.

In his remarkable little book, The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis relates the story of when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a priest came seeking his counsel. The priest felt guilty because he feared he was too prone to offer forgiveness to the penitents who came to him in the confessional. The pope asked him what he did when he had these doubts. His reply: “I go to our chapel … and say to Jesus, ‘Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But you’re the one who gave me the bad example!’ ”[4]

Praise God that there are no limits to his mercy! And may it be our highest privilege and greatest delight to share God’s mercy in a world that desperately needs it.

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[1]     “Mercy”, The New Bible Dictionary, 809

[2]     Evil and the Justice of God, 99

[3]     “Why We Need to Say, ‘Lord, have mercy!’ ”, Huffington Post, 16 Sep 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fr-richard-rohr/why-we-need-to-say-lord-h_b_3935884.html

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“A Birthday Prayer” (2 Thessalonians 1:11-12)

Allow me to begin by saying what an honour and a joy it is to be among you at First Congregational this morning on the occasion of your pastor’s birthday. Doug Mott and I go back a long way. I treasure not only my friendship with him and Ann but also the privilege of having watched First Congregational grow from a little gathering in the Police Club to the vibrant community that you are today, playing a significant role in making a difference for Christ in this city.

Not many of you may be familiar with the name of Terry Fulham. But thirty-five years ago he was a major figure in the church renewal scene in North America. Over the course of a few years, under his remarkable teaching and leadership, he had seen his congregation at St Paul’s Church in Darien, Connecticut, grow from a couple of hundred worshippers to nearly three thousand. And people were flocking from all over to find out how it happened.

In response to this Terry Fulham and St Paul’s offered regular renewal conferences for clergy and for lay people. I was leading a church in suburban Montreal at the time. Darien was an easy six-hour drive away, all on Interstates, and so in the fall of 1982 I decided to make the journey.

Now one of the things about St Paul’s in Darien was that they were a praying church. And so if you wanted to participate in one of their conferences you had to register several weeks in advance so that they could have time to pray for you—and I mean really pray. There were a couple of things I was praying about too. One was that I would have a chance to get together with a gentleman named Peter Moore, who headed up a very effective ministry called FOCUS in a number of the east coast prep schools. The other was that I would have an opportunity to meet up with a man who at that time was writing a national syndicated column from an explicitly Christian perspective. Both of these men lived in Darien and both worshipped at St Paul’s.

Well, what should I find when I registered but that I had been booked in to stay at the home of Peter and Sandy Moore throughout the time of the conference? When I asked Peter about the possibility of meeting up with the columnist, he said to me, “Why he’s a member of our home group. You’ll be meeting with them tomorrow evening.” Clearly God was answering both my prayers and those of the good folk at St Paul’s. He had prepared the way before me in what I thought was quite a remarkable manner.

Yet there was a further surprise in store for me. That was that I would be sharing my room with another Canadian, a young associate pastor from a congregation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Now I don’t think it will take you too long to figure out who that was: none other than your own Doug Mott. I had no idea of the significance of that meeting and the conversations we enjoyed after the conference each day until three years later, when I moved to Halifax and began to serve as rector of St Paul’s Church. And who was one of the first people to welcome me? Of course—Doug Mott.

One of the most precious and significant aspects of our friendship over the years that followed was to share together in a pastors’ prayer group that met over coffee every second Tuesday morning. Over my more than eighteen years in that group I don’t think there was a single one of us who did not go through some significant struggles. There was often laughter, there were sometimes tears, but there was always prayer. The result was that for most of us there was almost nothing that we would allow to get in the way of those precious Tuesday morning times. We were united in the unbreakable bonds of the fellowship of prayer and common ministry in Jesus’ name.

Now here we are, and more than thirty years have flowed under the bridge. Yet I know that you still have the same passion for Christ and the same desire to be of service to him, that you had all those years ago. Indeed, if anything, it glows only brighter. And so, what to preach on, on this significant birthday? Well, the verses I believe that the Lord has given to me are these, from 2 Thessalonians 1:11 and 12. They are the apostle Paul’s prayer for the Christian believers in Thessalonica, and I hope they may become the prayer of all of us for you on this auspicious occasion.

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is a lot of prayer packed into those two little verses. But it seems to me that Paul is essentially praying for three things: that they may live up to God’s call on their lives; that they may see the fulfilment of their ministry and of their desire to serve Christ; and that the name of Jesus may be glorified in them. Let’s just pause there for a moment to take a brief look at each of them.

Made worthy

Paul’s first prayer for the Thessalonian believers was that they might be worthy of God’s calling. The word for “worthy” in the New Testament is axios. In the early church when the bishop was presenting a newly ordained priest or presbyter to the congregation, they would all exclaim in unison, “Axios! Axios! Axios!” to express their approval of the candidate. I can remember my ordination day and no doubt you can remember yours also, Doug. In my case I remember standing before the bishop as he read to me these words from the Book of Common Prayer:

Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his spouse and his body. And if it shall happen the same Church, or any member thereof, to take any hurt or hindrance by reason of your negligence, ye know the greatness of the fault, and also the horrible punishment that will ensue. Wherefore consider with yourselves the end of your ministry towards the children of God, towards the spouse and body of Christ; and see that you never cease your labour, your care and diligence, until you have done all that lieth in you, according to your bounden duty, to bring all such as are or shall be committed to your charge, unto that agreement in the faith and knowledge of God, and to that ripeness and perfectness of age in Christ, that there be no place left among you, either for error in religion, or for viciousness in life.

I think if I had had the least shred of wisdom at the time (and not the brashness of a twenty-something year-old fresh out of seminary), I ought to have made a dash for it right out of the service. I was having placed upon me responsibility for the spiritual well-being of men and women and children for whom Jesus had gone to the cross! I wonder, Doug, if you felt the same?

What does it mean to be worthy of our calling? If Peter and Andrew and James and John had had any idea of what they were getting into, would they have so quickly abandoned their boats on the shore of Lake Galilee in response to Jesus call to “Follow me”? Again and again they proved themselves not worthy of that calling: arguing over who was the greatest, asking to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans who wouldn’t welcome them into their village, cowering before a servant girl and denying that he even knew Jesus, passing off the women’s reports of Jesus’ resurrection as nonsense… And the list goes on.

When it comes down to it, let’s be honest. Who really is worthy of God’s calling? Can anyone here this morning stand up and make that claim? I know for certain that I can’t. With the prodigal son I cry aloud, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am not worthy to be called your son.” But of course Paul’s prayer was not that the Thessalonians would make themselves worthy of God’s calling. It was that God would make them worthy. And between those two things there is a world—no, a universe—of difference.

Fulfilled

The second part of Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians was that God might “fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power”. I find that an interesting combination of words: “every resolve for good and every work of faith”. I rather like the way Eugene Peterson put it in his translation in The Message: “I pray that he’ll fill your good ideas and acts of faith with his own energy so that it all amounts to something.”

The words suggest to me that essential to any church, any ministry, is a desire, a vision—we might even say, a passion. There was a fad not so long ago that every church had to have a “mission statement”. And that’s not always a bad thing. The problem is that, from what I’ve seen, many such statements are either so vague and general that they don’t lead you anywhere or they are so specific that they don’t allow for flexibility when circumstances change or the Holy Spirit is calling us to something new. A case in point is the church where I served until a couple of years ago. We found ourselves and our mission radically altered when our ranks were swollen by more than a hundred refugees from Burma.

We never know what surprises God may have for us around the corner. The apostles never dreamed that the church should grow to include non-Jews, or that persecution should only make the church stronger and not destroy it. And Doug, I can’t imagine that when you were first ordained you could have predicted all the twists and turns along the way that have brought you to where you are now.

Some of you may remember Tom Robinson, the founding director of City Centre Ministry here in Halifax. Tom was also the founder of the All Souls’ Clubhouse, an outreach and resource centre to young people in central London. In its early days Tom and his colleagues spent countless hours and gallons of sweat to put together an attractive facility that would house its various activities. Many years later, when he went back for a visit, he found to his horror that almost no evidence of that hard work remained. The building was a shambles. That disappointment quickly evaporated, however, when he visited some of the original members of the club, who were continuing to follow and serve Christ faithfully and devotedly. He was forced to realize that the Holy Spirit is not nearly as interested in building institutions as he is in changing lives.

Doug, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine—that God has taken my “good ideas” (as Peterson put it) and my very limited acts of faith and used them in ways that I might never have imagined. And so, “straining towards what is ahead,” as Paul writes elsewhere, “we press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3:12-13).

Glorified

All of this brings us to the third part of Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians: that the name of the Lord Jesus might be glorified in them. And really that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? It’s not me or even the church in the final outcome. It’s Jesus that we’re all about. Like John the Baptist standing in the waters of the Jordan, we recognize that we must decrease if he is to increase.

One of the qualities I have always appreciated in Doug is that he is genuine. I know when he is annoyed about something, or amused, or discouraged, or overjoyed. And I believe that is a quality that the Holy Spirit has used in him (and continues to use) to make Jesus real to others.

Jesus is not going to be glorified by our trying to appear better or holier or more righteous than we are. That is the way of the Pharisees and it will always end in failure. No, as the Bible teaches us again and again, it will only be though God’s grace. By grace we are made right with him; by grace we have heard his call; by grace we have been raised to new life; by grace we are able to enter his presence; by grace we are heirs of eternal life; by grace we have been given the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit; and by grace that same Holy Spirit will somehow take our faltering words and feeble actions that the Lord Jesus might be glorified in us. This was a lesson that none less than the apostle Paul himself had to learn, when he wrote,

But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

Doug, I am grateful for the many ways in which the Lord has displayed and continues to display his grace in you. May he empower you to continue to use both your strengths and your weaknesses to draw others to him—and at this point I think the best thing I can do is to step aside and invite you all to join with me as we bring our brother Doug before the Lord in prayer.

May our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.