January 30, 2022

I remember officiating 23 weddings in my 3.5 year Jasper ministry, and so often the couples would choose today’s epistle from Corinthians 13 as a reading for their wedding – especially the parts about love being patient and kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude or irritable or resentful … and that love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things, etc. I’d try not to roll my eyes during the service at such rosy expectations or ideals of what married life might be like. ‘Good luck with that!’ I thought, as these lofty ideals or assumptions were proclaimed from the lectern.

It was mostly fun and often interesting doing all those weddings – with Jasper often chosen by couples because of the great natural beauty of the national park, and all the photogenic stained glass in the Anglican church there. A few weddings featured grooms and groomsmen in kilts, and while standing at the back with them waiting for the bride one day, I thought I’d make conversation by asking what they carried in their sporran furry pouches; and one cheerfully responded: ‘oh you know, the usual things – Kleenex, lipstick and so on’. I guess that’s an improvement over ammunition and rations as per the early days. Cell phones and wallets are the more likely modern contents.

Another wedding featured the bride generously having tried to honour her ne’er-do well father by asking him to ‘give her away’ – although I always suggested that it’s not the best idea to ‘give’ the bride away as if she was a piece of property handed down from the father to the groom. But it made for nice photos so many people still used the custom. Anyways the father in question at that wedding had succumbed to excessive drinking many times throughout his life, and unfortunately the pre-nuptial festivities, after the church rehearsal saw him over-indulging to a drastic degree – so much so that police had to be called so they could confine him safely until he’d sobered up. But the bride was no longer interested in putting up with her father’s unruly shenanigans, so she requested in advance that the church doors be locked after she arrived, so that he could not disrupt the wedding. Funny, but also sad of course.

Anyways, enough about weddings, there’s also much wisdom here for the journey of faith in this epistle reading, and I’m pretty sure that Paul is talking about compassionate agape love rather than romantic love. Paul is implying that our actions are more important than any eloquent knowledge about faith, or any kind of showy self-sacrifice. And we Christians often spend a lot of time trying to be those perfectly kind and nice Christians, seldom rude or critical … but Jesus never told us to be “nice” all the time. In fact, he was often not nice as he confronted many pompous or misinformed religious practices, especially those that were apathetic or caused hardship for the poor and oppressed. As we heard Jesus proclaim from Isaiah last week – God sent him to bring good news to the poor and to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim liberty to captives – and there are still many types of captivity, like debt and human smuggling. I’m certainly not agreeing with those 10 or 15% of unvaccinated truckers and their so-called ‘freedom convoy’. Quite the contrary -- I tried to be brave last week and enter a comment on one of the Vancouver Sun online articles about this convoy to Ottawa. I dared to point out that when freedom has us making choices that cause great harm or death to others, then those are criminal choices. Well!! Talk about feeling ‘hit’ by Mack trucks in the many angry responses I received!

However, those angry responses were nothing compared to what Jesus gets from his hometown neighbours and old friends. We heard how they try to push him off the cliff when he makes it clear that he won’t be using his powers to ‘perform’ impressive things for them. I really don’t know why the lectionary separates last week’s gospel from this week’s when it was all one brief event of Jesus talking to his hometown synagogue gathering about what God’s reign is really about! Jesus knows that “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” and so he doesn’t seem surprised when they become filled with rage at him, as he deftly passes through the midst of them and goes on his way … it’s almost like he’s got a Harry Potter invisibility cloak!

Given today’s date I’d also like to mention upcoming February 1st as Saint Brigid’s Day, which is close to the old Gaelic festival of Imbolc, or the return of the light – being about halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. There are some fascinating historical traditions involved in the history of Imbolc as Wikipedia describes it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc. Brigid is not mentioned in our FAS saints book although Brigid of Kildare is on other church calendars for February 1st or 2nd. Saint Brigid is thought to be a Christianized version of the ancient Goddess Brigid; and Christians celebrated this festival for centuries with Candlemas – blessing of candles.

I’d like to end with a brief look at our Jeremiah reading in which young Jeremiah receives his prophetic calling from God, and he replies so humbly by saying: “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” God replies ‘don’t say I am only a boy’ because God will tell Jeremiah where to go and what to say. Now most of us cannot use excessive youth as an excuse, but we might be tempted to use older age as an excuse. I doubt that God is asking any of us to undertake strenuous journeys of prophetic proclamation … but our wisdom & experience of God’s grace in our lives -- may well be helpful for good to prevail over evil in our world. May we too be ready to say yes, Amen.