Planetary Repentance

On this Black Friday I'm reminding myself that a foundational tenet of my faith is that God is the Creator. I'm not sure how I reconcile this with the Big Bang and evolution but  I'm with Pope Francis that God can be present in these processes and we don't have to be shackled by misguided convictions about a literal six-day creation.

Even though humans  have made some feeble steps in exploring the universe, to this point there is no evidence of another planet like ours which sustains complex life forms. What we can agree upon, whatever we think about the origins of Earth and the creatures which inhabit it, is that there is a what seems like a gossamer thin layer around the planet which is the atmosphere allowing us to exist. It's only a few kilometres deep in a universe where distances are measured in light years. At the summit of the highest mountain, Everest, humans can't breathe without assistance.  

You may have been aware of late that many cities in Asia have been choked by pollution, the result of burgeoning populations, the acceleration of industrial pollution, and the development of a middle class which can afford inexpensive, carbon-spewing vehicles. They want the Western notion of the "good life."



Recently cities in India and China have been forced to close schools and issue warnings about airborne particulate levels so high that they are beyond standards of measurement. This is far more than an inconvenience. It's estimated that between China and India six thousand people a DAY die of air pollution, which is more than 200,000 a year.

When I read the stories of severe degradation of air quality in other parts of the world I remind myself that ultimately we share that atmosphere and breathe that air. Even the world's greenest country, Iceland, is affected by pollution from Asia And when I decry what is happening I have to ask about my lifestyle, including hopping on a plane for a vacation in Iceland or anywhere else. Black Friday is another reminder of how messed up our priorities can be.

I realize that in order not to be a hypocrite about my desire to be a responsible citizen of Earth and a child of the Creator I have to repent, to change my foolish ways. It's finding the courage to do so.

Comments?

Gratitude Day

There is plenty of advice out there for Americans who will be gathered around family tables today, trying to navigate through strong emotions about the recent presidential election. Apparently some people don't want to be at home because they would rather avoid what could be contentious conversations.

Of course Thanksgiving is about gratitude, whether it is Canadian in October or American in November. The stats above intrigue me. They suggest that in the States  if you're 'ligous you are more likely to feel gratitude. I wonder what comes first, the turkey or the egg? Does gratitude lead us to be religious, or does religion prompt us to be thankful?

I figure that when we attend church or synagogue or mosque there is regular encouragement to be generous and grateful. And I'm hoping that when we realize that we are blessed by God we then choose to bless others.

We do know that faith groups are a driving force behind food banks and refugee sponsorships and other humanitarian endeavours. I am regularly encouraging folk to respond to crises in other parts of the world as well.

When I trust that God is good, I want to at least attempt to be good myself, and I am more inclined this way when I gather with others of like mind. I can be impressively selfish, but thoughtful worship and praise can prompt me toward a higher good.

Does faith make you more grateful? Do you think it matters?

All God's Creatures

Through the years of this blog I've written, from time to time, about medieval monasteries as centres for learning and the arts. While some paint the religious communities as places of privilege, we can't underestimate the contribution to the development of scholarship and medical advancement and creativity within these oases of enlightenment. Prosperity and with it a drift from gospel values often led to their downfall and movements for renewal.

The copying houses of monasteries were responsible for many of the exquisite illustrated works of scripture and other sacred texts described as "illuminated manuscripts." One has recently been shared with the world by the University of Aberdeen in digital form, and not surprisingly it is called the Aberdeen Bestiary. Bestiaries depict various creatures, sometimes imaginary but often real. This "book of beasts" once belonged to Henry VII but it dates back to the 12th century. And rather than being a treasure for the aristocracy it may have been used as a text book by monks, with portions intended to be read aloud. There are actually fingerprints and notes in the margins.



I appreciate that monasteries weren't so heavenly minded that they were no earthly good. Here is evidence that monks and the youth they educated also learned about the natural world and how it worked.

This is a sacred task for us today, it seems to me. These religious folk of another time didn't have nearly the impact on the environment as we do today. We have lost much of our sense of the natural world and any nudge to resacralize it is meaningful.

Hope for Standing Rock?

Last night police and other law enforcement officials scattered pipeline protesters in North Dakota. The police used water cannons to disperse the demonstrators despite freezing temperatures and one woman's arm was so badly injured it may be amputated. Why are they there and how has it come to this?




Here is a description from the National Catholic Reporter:

The demonstration against the Dakota Access Pipeline began in April, and nd has since brought more than 200 Native American tribes together, in what has been called the largest such gathering in modern times. Support has also come from other corners, including numerous environmental organizations, to the Oceti Sakowin camp near the mouth of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers.

The Standing Rock Sioux have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the pipeline will cross land viewed as sacred, including burial sites, and is protected by existing treaties, and also pose a threat to the tribe's primary water source. The proposed path would take the pipeline underneath Lake Oahe and the Missouri River a half mile upstream of the tribe's reservation boundary. The tribe and supports have noted an earlier route had the pipeline passing near Bismarck, but was rejected early in the planning to protect municipal water supplies. If completed, the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline would carry daily as much as 570,000 barrels of crude oil from western North Dakota to Illinois,

Some observers figure that the heavy-handedness is because these are First Nations people. Many have been arrested, including journalists documenting the protest.  In stark contrast, recently a group of white armed occupiers were inexplicably acquitted of charges after they took over a federal wildlife reserve.

There are celebrities at Standing Rock and lesser lights, including hundreds of faith leaders. On All Saints Day more than 500 clergy were there in solidarity with the Standing Rock tribe because they know this is a matter of justice for people who have been minimized, oppressed and robbed for centuries, and it must stop.

I'm grateful that they are bearing witness, and I hope there is a just outcome. I'm not holding my breath, but I will pray. This is the Sunday of hope in the Advent season, so I better.

Have you been following this situation? Are you hopeful or disillusioned, or a little of both?

Moral Leadership

American President Obama is in the final months of his second term in office and this weekend he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is will into her third. They have become friends over time, and they may have commiserated about the state of generous liberalism in both their countries and the rise of troubling protectionist nationalism in both the States and Europe.

Obama must be wondering whether President-elect Trump will dismantle much of his administration's work on general health care and environmental protection. Merkel announced over the weekend that she will seek a fourth term, but she must be aware that this will be the fight of her life. Many Germans are dissatisfied with her bold decision to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees in a short period of time. Right-wing parties are on the ascent in several countries and Merkel's popularity has plummeted.

Both Merkel and Obama are Christians, and relatively open about it. Merkel's father was a Lutheran pastor and  theologian and she respected his intellectual rigour. She also  grew up in a centre for those with intellectual and physical challenges.

Some would say that politicians should not allow their religious convictions impinge on their elected roles, but we do hope that all people including governmental leaders would have a moral and ethical framework out of which the make decisions. Actually, Merkel's party is the Christian Democrats, so there are Christian underpinnings.

I am grateful for her leadership on the world stage and hope in continues.

Testify

No, this is not Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, it is Canada's capital city, Ottawa, in the year 2016. Many synagogues in this country have security when their congregations worship and from time to time there are anti-Semitic acts including graffiti and the toppling of gravestones. These cowardly occurrences tend to be few and far between. This synagogue has been defaced three times in the past week. Surely the  American election of a racist, misogynist president and his appointment of an Islamophobe and ant-Semite to a top position in his regime has emboldened the hundreds of  ugly incidents on both sides of the border.

I am still startled and angered by the hatred directed toward others because they are in the minds of some"other," foreign, suspicious. While in my head I'm convinced that the Christian way is "do not repay evil with evil" there are times when I would like to smack a cheek rather than turn one.

This past Sunday I preached on the unsettling passage in Luke 21 where Jesus tells his followers that they will be persecuted and they better get used to it. And he tells them to bear witness and testify to the gospel. I suggested that this is both an exhortation to stand in solidarity with those who are persecuted for their faith around the world, whatever that faith might be, and to be bold in upholding what we know to be right in our own settings.

When we hear the stories of people accosted on buses, and look at the ugly symbol of hatred on those synagogue doors we must find the courage to be faithful.

Comments?

Post-Truth?

³⁷ Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” ³⁸ Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

                                                                                 John 18:37-38  (NRSV)

Well, it shouldn't surprise us that "post-truth" has been chosen as the word of the year:

Oxford Dictionaries chose "post-truth" as their word of the year on Wednesday, saying its use had spiked because of the Brexit vote in Britain and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States.

"Post-truth has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary," Oxford Dictionaries said in a statement, noting that usage had increased by 2,000 percent since last year. The publisher defined the word as "relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".

A few years ago the term "truthiness" to describe the vague and rather uneasy relationship with the truth which afflicts our society. Post-truth takes this a step further, into a realm where what might appear as flat-out falsehood and lying is ignored or accepted because it fits the convictions of the hearer.

Some would argue that this is what religion is all about, the subjective lens through which we see the world. Sadly, this can be the case, yet we hope that as we discern and listen for the voice of God we will develop a moral and ethical framework based on justice, compassion and abiding love. It would seem that many Christians in the United States readily abandoned any concern about this sort of truth during the recent election. One evangelical leader cogently observed that the religious right had become what it often rails against, a morally relativistic community which no longer cares about reading its moral compass as long as its needs are met.

When Jesus, under arrest, told the Roman procurator Pilate that he had come to bear witness to the truth the cynical response was "what is truth?" The gospel writer John doesn't record a response from Jesus. This was not a comfortable theological chat but a declaration of mission, in spite of the outcome.

After this exchange Pilate admits that there is no real case against Jesus and wants to release him. Instead he does the morally and politically expedient thing, literally washing his hands of responsibility and sending Jesus to be scourged and crucified.

I pray that we will not become a hand-washing, post-truth culture, but I'm discouraged of late. I think of the late, quirky Christian writer Flannery O'Connor who offered "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."  How true.

Thoughts?

The Wild Places

¹¹ God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; ¹²and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.  1 Kings 19:11-12


I recently borrowed a biography called Paul McCartney: The Life from the library and used a forklift to bring it home. Philip Norman's impressive volume is more than 800 pages in length and I decided to check out the first couple of hundred pages out of curiosity about the early days of a band that produced some of the most ear-catching, then innovative music of the rock and roll era. John, Paul, George and Ringo were portrayed as the Fab Four, fun-loving guys who became teen idols around the world. The song writing duo of Lennon & McCartney -- or McCartney & Lennon -- was one of the greats, developing out of a shared teen passion for music.

Eventually the cracks began to appear in the care-free façade and differences of opinion became serious arguments and alienation. Eventually Paul left, or was pushed out on such bad terms with the others that he was in a deep depression.

Paul fled the intense public scrutiny to the farm he had purchased near Kintyre, in Scotland. He went with Linda , the love of his life and there he busied himself with fixing up the old farmhouse and recording an album which was his first significant post-Beatles enterprise. Although Linda was a New York photojournalist she loved the outdoors and later wrote; "It was like nothing I ever living in before. The most beautiful land you've ever seen...way at the end of nowhere."


Many of us have experiences of serious soul work taking place in solitude and silence. Sometimes it is so that we can be healed from emotional trauma and sometimes it is the opportunity for creativity which the bustle of daily living doesn't afford. Often we listen for the voice of God heard through wind and waves and the "sound of sheer silence," to borrow from the story of the exhausted Elijah in the biblical book of Kings.

I ended up reading all 800+ pages Philip Norman's biography. He is an excellent writer. I was entertained, but also intrigued by Paul's love of the wild places for restoration.

Many of you are aware of my love of solitude and the natural world. Any observations of your own? Could you live well off the beaten track? Do you encounter God in the wild places? Is there a particular place for you?

Royal Anointing

We have been happily addicted to the Netfllix series The Crown which is about the life of Queen Elizabeth II, our monarch. I am not a monarchist and through the years I have teased my dear mother mercilessly about her fascination with and loyalty to Elizabeth. Mom was born in England and she is just a few months older than the queen. She was actually presented to Queen Elizabeth years ago in Bermuda. Mom was deathly ill but wouldn't have missed the opportunity if she'd undergone multiple amputations.  She would have loved this series a few years ago and we might be able to figure it out for her even now.

The story line is surprisingly engaging, much of the dialogue is thoughtful, and there are "I didn't know that " scenes which satisfy my hunger for knowledge.

At  Elizabeth's coronation in 1953 (aged 25) she was weighed down with regal garments including a five pound crown. The coronation took place in a church (Westminster Abbey), a bishop presided, and much of the language was religious.

I was quite taken by the  scene of the anointing, a moment not filmed at the time for what was the first television broadcast of a coronation because it was considered too sacred. Elizabeth was anointed on her hands and breast and brow with oil made to a special recipe (11 secret herbs and spices?) and using particular utensils.

For all the pomp and circumstance I thought of the Christian traditions of anointing for the sick and at baptism. These are special moments for me as a pastor and I've often had a powerful sense of God's presence as I apply the oil in the sign of the cross. There are lots of scripture passages about anointing and the connection between royal and holy anointing is rather fluid (pun intended.)

We can dismiss these symbols as hocus pocus but I find them deeply meaningful and The Crown reminded me of the experiences I've had.

Anyone else watching the series? Have you ever been anointed in a religious ceremony? What do you think of it all?