Hi everyone!
It’s been a while! I’m back from holidays and want to welcome you all back to our worship service online, this time for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, landing on September 1st, 2024.
The bulletin for this service can be found here. In it, you’ll find the order and words of the liturgy and the full sermon. You can follow long either with the bulletin or with the words that will be up on your screen, and the sermon is also included on this page below the video.
To enhance your online worship experience, you can have a candle nearby, lit at the beginning of the service and extinguished near the end when the altar candles are put out. You can also participate in communion if you wish and are comfortable, by having something small to eat and drink ready for the appropriate time. Further instruction will be given then.
May God’s inclusive and expansive love bless your soul, this day and always!
Lord, by the power of your Spirit open our eyes and ears to know your presence with us, our hearts and minds to learn from your Word, and our souls and spirits to feel your grace and love for us all, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Again, I’m back from holidays. And before anyone asks again, my family and I were in town the whole time. I think we might have driven out to Surrey or Richmond a couple times during that time, but rest assured, every night of my holidays were spent in our own beds. I just wanted get out of the way the answer to this number 1 question that I get asked every time I go on holidays, you know, whether or not I did any travelling.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a totally legit and understandable question, one that I have and probably would again ask others about their holidays. It’s just the usual question because for many people, travelling is life. So much so that they wouldn’t even bother taking time off work unless it’s for a trip somewhere. And in the off chance event that their trip is cancelled for whatever reason, I’ve known people to just forfeit that time off and go back to work even when they aren’t expected to. It’s like there’s no point of not working unless you’re travelling.
While I wish that were true for me, it just isn’t. While I wish I could just perpetually and endlessly work and only take breaks when I’m spending that hard earned money to feel stressed in other parts of the world, I’m actually fine with just sitting at home feeling stressed for free. But I get it, this could be a foreign concept to a lot of people. They might look at me after I say that I’m ok with these stay-cations, and think that I’m a little bit weird. And they wouldn’t be wrong, I fully acknowledge that I am a bit weird. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been called that, and I’m quite certain it won’t be the last. It’s just a fact of life and who I am. Weird.
Or, different at least, in many ways. As a kid, I was like the only boy in my class who didn’t like to watch or play hockey. I was the only Chinese kid who didn’t really speak Chinese. I was the only teenaged boy at the church where I grew up that wore earrings and listened to music with that “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” sticker on it. And even now as an adult, I’m like the only one among my friends who doesn’t own the house he lives in, I’m the oldest in my family to get married and have kids, and my taste in music is still frowned upon for some strange reason, mostly from said kids. And I’ve talked in the past about how well I fit in among my Lutheran clergy colleagues… in that, I don’t really.
So yeah, I’ve always been a bit different, kind of weird, one to dance to the beat of my own drum, much to the chagrin of my parents and those around me. It sometimes gets to the point where I almost want to conform to the expectations put on me, I want to change to fit in more, I want to be who everyone wants me to be. Or at least, who I think they want me to be. So I tried to play hockey, I pretended to understand Chinese, and I started listening to Christian rap music (it’s mostly awful, by the way). I was mindful of the criticisms and complaints that I received that told me where I was lacking and how I could improve myself.
And yet, I still couldn’t escape it. I still was seen as not living up to those expectations. I still was weird.
These kinds of criticisms and complaints about others being weird or acting out of line is exactly what happened in today’s gospel lesson. In another attempt to discredit Jesus and his followers, the Pharisees and religious leaders noticed the fact that some of those followers didn’t wash their hands before eating. And I’ll admit, that sounds pretty disgusting if you think about how they didn’t have the modern-day conveniences that we have that help to keep the germs off our hands. You know, things like hand sanitizer, eating utensils, toilet paper.
Aaaaaanyway, the Pharisees pointed out the disciples’ neglect of washing their hands before eating, something that apparently would be unheard of and weird as every other Jew apparently always wash their hands. And on the surface, they aren’t wrong in pointing it out. I mean like I said, their hands were probably filthy and those germs and stuff were going right into their mouths. So it’s for their own good to wash their hands before eating because who knows where those hands have been and what they’ve touched and what might still be clinging onto them. That’s the exact reason why I still have to remind our kids to wash their hands before eating, and why my wife reminds me to.
This honest and earnest attempt to be helpful from the Pharisees was abruptly shot down in a rebuke from Jesus. Is that really fair? They were just pointing out how the disciples were potentially harming themselves with their poor hygiene. So it would have been in their best interests for the Pharisees to make this their business.
Except, I’m not entirely convinced that that’s what was going on. I mean, I don’t really know the reason why the Pharisees said what they said, but it probably wasn’t about health or being helpful, it probably was to complain. But what I mean is that I don’t know if Jesus’ rebuke was for the Pharisees as much as it was for his disciples.
I’m not saying that Jesus was agreeing with the Pharisees and was telling his disciples to wash their dang hands for goodness sake, but I think he knew what the disciple might have been feeling after hearing the Pharisees calling them out. In that, maybe they felt a bit condemned. Judged, perhaps. Or even just weird.
Maybe those feelings led them to want to conform to what the customs, the religious leaders, the world as they knew it, was telling them to be.
I know that’s what I would have felt like. I know that is how I’d want to rectify the situation. I know I’d be running off to find a thing of water to wash my hands right away while saying “sorry” the whole time.
Sure, maybe I won’t feel like I was defiled, but I would feel like I didn’t belong, that I didn’t fit in, that I was in some shape or form… wrong.
And so to me, Jesus was reminding his disciples that this defilement that the Pharisees accused them of doesn’t come from a lack of washing hands, from not observing tradition or custom, or even how much we fit in with the masses or not. We as God’s people aren’t defined by how much we are like everyone else. The truth is, we are not called to be conformed to the rituals and norms that we have created for ourselves, but rather we are called to be transformed by God’s good and perfect will.
That is, God’s good and perfect will of love, community, and inclusion.
I know, it isn’t easy to see life through that lens. I mean we often confuse our denominational doctrine and theology as God’s immovable Word. We sometimes see Western common sense as absolute morality. And we might even view the preferences and reasonings of others as greater than our own. And so we don’t share in those ideals and thoughts, we might think ourselves as weird, we might get hung up on how different we are from everyone else, we might even judge ourselves as defiled and unwelcome because we don’t fit in.
But we forget that God is bigger than that. That God’s love is more diverse than we expect or maybe even comfortable with. That the grace God gives to all people forgives a lot more than our minor faux pas, but also forgives those that don’t agree with or really like us, those that might not respect our differences, those that judge us and condemn us as too different. God loves and forgives even them. Just as God loves and forgives even us.
So with this in mind, we can go through life free from the stress of trying to be like others. We can remember that we aren’t excluded because we’re different, we aren’t disqualified because we’re weird, we aren’t unwelcomed because we’re not like everyone else. Instead, we can enter into relationships without the fear of being different. We can see the beauty in diversity. We can unabashedly and unreservedly be our wild and wonderful weird selves, knowing that God will always and eternally love us with a saving grace and transforms us by commands of love, a will of community, and the example of inclusive welcome.
So as we end this summer season and move back into the routine of the rest of the year, may we be joyfully excited to see and witness the new things that God might be doing in us and in the world, that we might be brought into new heights of community, welcome, and love. Thanks be to God. Amen.