Sermon January 16, 2011
1Corinthians 1:1-9
Eden Mills and Ebenezer United Church
Rev. Daryl Webber
Last Thursday I was making my way to the hospital to visit a good friend of ours and became part of a long string of cars stopped at the railroad tracks in Campbellville. The train was stuck, so I was told, and it was going to take a long time to get it moving again. Had I known I would have changed to route I took so as to avoid this bottleneck. So I turned around and found a different way around this train problem.
You think it is tough moving a train that is stuck, well it so happened that I was listening to a CBC report while at the tracks about Mexico and the War on Drugs they have been fighting there for some time. The guest on the radio said the war on Drugs has actually generated more poverty, more legal work, higher incarceration levels, and more criminal activity. The assumption that the war on drugs would help bring order back to the country and make it more attractive for trading partners in their economy has backfired and generated a conservative estimate of 7100 deaths related or presumed related to the campaign. The guest sighed and said it is going to many years to see the country recover and find a way forward.
You think it is hard to move a train, what of Mexico? It is going to be very difficult to move that country to embrace real transformation...more than the assumption of a war on drugs. It is hard work this transformation of a whole country.
Our friend, Gabor Mate, whose book we read in our book club last year questioned the assumption of the Canadian and American War on Drugs, saying that we overlook the mental health issues, the chemical makeup of the addicted human brain, systems of poverty, and the influence of marketing on addiction which we all are affected by and are driven by to tame our cravings. The War on Drugs assumes we criminalise and incarcerate those with the most obvious addiction and do not help them in working through their addiction, nor do we look at our own addiction to, among other things, new technology.
You think it is hard to move a train? It is I imagine. You think it is profoundly difficult to transform a country? Indeed, I can hardly imagine! To change the assumptions about addiction, would be enormous for those of us who are struggling with the “Hungry Ghost” as Mate described addiction. Changing the way the general culture we live in approaches brain functions and mental mental health is perhaps as difficult if not more difficult as moving the train in Campbellville.
And what of ourselves, the old tapes and voices of anger, resentment, regret, guilt, isolation that we wrestle with late at night. How do we bring transformation to our lives- lives that are called by God to embrace abundance. For those of us who are stuck before the tracks, can we even see the transformation that awaits us? Can we at least hear the Whistle down the tracks – a call to trust a little more, to listen for the voice of God's grace more attentively, to believe there is movement ahead?
The old Prophet Isaiah promised the people that “The word of God that goes out, never returns empty”. In God there is always the whistle- a promise of a way forward, but we have to allow it in – the first signs of transformation. But it is hard to wait and we often find another way to avoid the mess altogether. Attentiveness to God's voice is a discipline we can trust, although we can find it difficult to practice in our rush to impose an assumption that “war” is required to fix the problem.
In Ben Wick's “Book of Losers” he has a little comic that says the thief who was robbing the bank didn't get access to the safe because he was pushing the door rather than pulling it open! Our own approach with its assumptions often times leaves us and whole cultures unfulfilled and stuck.
Our story from Corinthians this morning is the apostle Paul's effort to encourage the church community there to stand apart from the culture and assumptions of that young, important, diverse, talented wealthy city. People had come there to seek their fortune and because of the epicenter it was for trade and commerce people had found not only monetary gain, but prestige and importance, recognition and success. Paul had worked there as a tent maker, and likely repaired many of the ships' sails from his little shop in the marketplace there. He knew the people and while he saw the prosperity, he knew that human wealth was not the basis of a full life. The social context was putting strong pressure the Christian people to think and act selfishly. So he writes the church there and tells them they are to live as if outside of the culture- to measure success and wealth not from the account of their own wealth, but reflected in the health, unity and degree of community embodied in the the church- the very body of Christ. The church was the indicator of strength and health.
In a city of small shops and homes that had small interiors with larger court yards the Christian house churches would celebrate communion. But the limitations of space meant that important guests in communion would recline in the homes of the wealthy while others would have to stand in the courtyards of those meeting places. The limitations of space and of distinctions of class or importance had to be overcome. There was to be no division between people, Paul stated. They were called to transform their cultural assumptions and limitations tending to the whole body. Again the church's life was indicator of the well-being, not the individuals.
If transformation is ever to be possible we need the prophetic tradition of Paul and others who stand and see outside the preconceived notions of culture and offer a us a way to mature as human beings- to practice ways of transformation that add depth and commitment to communal life and to individuals, rather than maintaining dualisms and divisions and wars that block the crossing to abundant life in God. In this way Paul was calling the church to embrace its high calling as a people who trusted in God's ways and plans for abundant life. Paul called this the discipline of working grace
It was hard for Paul. To challenge the church to take seriously the work of faith, to be freed from the precious idols of self and the preconceived notions they took with them into the church; to embrace the prophetic movement of the Spirit; was to live outside the culture, and to find themselves a people of God's new creation. They were called to live not beneath the powers of the world, but be liberated to a life of obedience to God- to find devotion to God and community and how that practice actually deepens a sense of vocation in the world rather than fueling the system we operate from that keep us from crossing the tracks or finding transformation.
In our church we find opportunity to practice trust-as we are able, and as we are able to grow in our practice of both receiving and offering grace. We are called to remind each other that the preconceived notions we have of ourselves and others are limited and limiting. At worst they are empty of life, at best they maintain life, when met with grace there is a movement to embrace a new way of being- transformation. As Isaiah says, the word of God that goes out never returns empty.
We have opportunity this week as people cross our paths, as we pray for our church family, as we pray over our own lives, that cycles of addiction, grudges, old narratives, distrust, fear will give way to the strength of grace, and there will be a depth in our Christian practice that helps us see our vocation and value in ways that produce fruit and abundant life. Thanks be to God. Amen
