May 15, 2022

First a story – a powerful Buddhist story shared on Facebook, about a man whose wife dies, after which he especially cherishes his young son. While he’s away on business, bandits raid their village and burn it to the ground. The bandits capture the boy but when the father returns, he finds a charred corpse that he believes to be his son, so he has the corpse cremated, and carries the bag of ashes with him everywhere, including into his bed each night, where he often weeps in agonized mourning. One day his son escapes the bandits and finds his way home to the house his father rebuilt. Arriving at midnight he knocks on the door. His father is in bed sobbing while holding his bag of ashes, and asks who is it? The child tells him “It’s me, Daddy, it’s your son – open the door.” But the father can’t see past his grief and thinks this is a malicious child playing a cruel trick on him. “Go away and leave me alone” he says. The boy knocks again but the father refuses to let him in, so he turns and slowly walks away. The father and son never saw one another again. The Buddhist writer Sogyal Rinpoche uses this story to warn us not to cling so strongly to old ‘truths’ that we do not answer the door to let in newer truths when they come knocking.

“See I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5). These words are God’s first time speaking in the biblical Book of Revelation, which is the last book of the Bible. Here we are near the end of that last book, and God’s main message to us is: See (or Behold) I am making all things new! So often in Christian history, and sadly still today, the Bible has been used as a set-in-stone kind of item; as if it contained all wisdom for all time, and therefore nothing changes after that. And yet Boom – near the end of it, and in the present tense, God is making all things new. Darn it, no closure, I guess … no satisfying conclusions that express things once-and-for-all. Instead, we have to keep open minds and keep learning. Meanwhile it was not until the 5th century that all the Christian churches came to a basic agreement on Biblical canon – what stays in the Bible, and what doesn’t. And even now there are differences. For example, some of the apocryphal books in our bibles are part of the regular canonical books in Catholic bibles. Like many a good book, the ending keeps you hanging, wanting more, looking for the next in the series, like the Harry Potter books, or the chapters of Charles Dickens books sent across the Atlantic to eagerly waiting readers.

Here’s another reading about God making a new heaven and a new earth – because the first heaven and earth had passed away … sounds rather ominous given our current state of climate crisis. But the message here is a joyful one – God will wipe away every tear from the eyes of mortals “mourning and crying and pain will be no more”. So let’s not fear the new things that God may be doing in our midst, trusting instead that God is the Alpha and Omega – beginning and ending of all that is and shall be.

In terms of beginnings our first reading tells the familiar but strange story from Acts – of Peter having a vision in which a large sheet full of many animals comes down from heaven – three times we are told – and each time Peter hears the Lord telling him to ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ This story always made me more nauseous then religious, and of course the real point of the story is that all that God has made is ‘clean’ or good. Here we have the earliest followers of Jesus, who were originally all Jewish like Jesus was in his human life – taking in the surprising fact that the Holy Spirit was present and active amongst the Gentiles too. What?! The unwashed, the uncircumcised -- were also among the followers of the Risen Christ?! That’s clearly not what they were expecting. Their purity laws about right foods and right rituals and right ethnicity were so entrenched in their hearts and minds, that it was challenging to see beyond the narrow confines of their own heritage – to see ‘outsiders’ through God’s loving and accepting eyes. Lest we pride ourselves on having become much more enlightened about such things … we need only look at how early European Christians in Canada treated indigenous people to realize how stuck and stuck up we were -- thinking that our religion and heritage was pure and true – not “savage” like these others already inhabiting the land that Europeans were “discovering”. Our beginnings on Turtle Island (North America) were sadly rife with the kind of arrogance that harms others. Our ancestors clung to old truths and did not open the door to learn how God was already at work with the First Nations people on these lands.

That Buddhist story from Facebook that I started with today with the father clinging to ashes instead of opening the door to let in his living son https://www.facebook.com/416604375033927/posts/pfbid0jqoXwbUyrcSfxHH5GJzYk1t7uH1ji5AmjnEDGKEXxnBanr72h7kFg8yCmt8Tzg7vl/

is accompanied with a poignant image of a small child on tiptoes straining his arms upward to try and reach the handles of two big doors – way too heavy for him to open.

I’m sure that if we were there with them, we’d run up to help … assuming that something good is hopefully on the other side. But the doors to the future of younger generations do not seem to be opening to many of the good things we’ve enjoyed, especially clean air, housing, education and a healthy planet overall. May we not overly cling to the old, but instead see how God is making all things new, Amen.