Monthly Archives: July 2025

Telling our story

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National Bishop Susan Johnson (ELCIC) listens to words of gratitude for her 18 years of service as national bishop (July 12, 2025, Winnipeg, http://www.elcic.ca)

The Mary-and-Martha Gospel story (Luke 10:38-42) reminds me of what sometimes happens when family and/or friends gather around a table on a holiday or to celebrate some special occasion. Over the meal, each person has a different take on the subject matter at hand. Everyone has their own opinion.

After years of regularly encountering this Gospel in the lectionary, and preaching countless sermons on it, I have concluded that there are at least three characters sitting around our table today. These three characters represent my own evolution of understanding this Gospel story. They are the Literalist, the Rebel, and the Peacemaker.

The Literalist is the first to speak. The Literalist reads this Gospel and concludes that Mary is the person that we all should model: the one who is quiet and listens to Jesus and doesn’t worry at all about the practical aspects of hosting Jesus and his entourage. While the mundane activities need to be done, we are called instead to aspire to the true, higher, spiritual gifts.

The Rebel, as you might guess, jumps right in. The Rebel resists the Literalist’s interpretation and declares their objection. They see it in the opposite way. Martha is the true hero, and Jesus is unfair in admonishing her. After all, the practical aspects of hosting a party are vital in healthy relationships and community building, not to mention how dominant cultures have tended to diminish and marginalize women who traditionally did these more active, practical things.

Finally, the Peacemaker quietly interjects. The Peacemaker will argue that both roles, or postures, are important to balance in any community or within any individual. Jesus isn’t taking sides in this debate. Rather, he directs his comments to the way Martha goes about her task, “worried and distracted by many things” (Luke 10:41). Whether we are active all the time and busy in our service to God, or praying in silence and resting in stillness and holy presence, distraction is the real culprit.

If you were invited to this table, and you came, where would you sit? And with whom? The Literalist? The Rebel? The Peacemaker? Or … is there yet another voice that needs to be heard?

In the farewell tribute and celebration of outgoing national bishop Susan Johnson at the national convention of the ELCIC last week, a speaker and close friend of Susan’s, Willard Metzger from the Mennonite Church and current director of the Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) talked about the strengths in Bishop Johnson’s ministry (www.elcic.ca).

He spoke about how Bishop Susan knows who she is. She is strong in her personal identity. In other words, she has an abiding love of self despite all the challenges she had faced, both personally and professionally, in her 18 years as bishop.

Willard went on to say that our love for God is affirmed when we love ourselves. Why? Because God created each of us. Each individual is created out of the love of God. It is fundamentally crucial as Christians to continually work at loving ourselves because God created you, made you, fashioned you in God’s image. We would then compassionately correct any messages we might tell ourselves, or the world might tell us, to the contrary.

Here’s another voice, another way of interpreting the Gospel. What shall we call this character? The Lover? It’s not about whether it’s better to be active and serving, attending to others and being hospitable in practical ways. Neither is it better to be contemplative, and reflective and sitting at Jesus’ feet. It’s not either/or.

It was that Mary knew who she was, was strong in her own identity, and loved herself enough to know that she just needed to do the one thing she was about and be who she was, at that point in time. The “better part” that she had chosen was that she chose to be herself without trying to be someone and do something she was not. She didn’t need to please someone else or fulfill their expectation of her. Jesus said it: Who she was and what she was about could not, “will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

This year, the national church has embarked on a restructuring process. During the convention the facilitators of the restructuring process engaged convention delegates, visitors and staff in an activity which I would like to practice here today, with you.

To begin with, the activity had us pair off. So before doing anything, turn to one person sitting beside or close to you and introduce yourself to them. It’s best to break the ice before diving in to do this exercise. If you are watching online with another person, you can do this with them at home.

The aim is to tell a story, together. I’ll start you off by saying, “Once upon a time ….” Then one of you will start telling your story by saying just one word. Then the other person will respond, but with just one word. And back and forth you go, taking turns but with just one word at a time.

Before you begin we need a general theme that will govern all our stories. So, what country or place in the world would you like to visit? …. What activity would you like to do there? ….

Ok, the story you will create together with your partner will be in this place and revolve around this activity. But remember, you say just one word when it’s your turn. I’ll give you a couple of minutes to do this, ok? Ready? “Once upon a time …” Go!

Time’s up! What was one challenge you may have encountered in the exercise? You may have had an idea about where the story should go. But then your partner would say a word that totally threw you off. They, obviously, can’t read your mind. And they might very well rather take the story in a different direction.

For the exercise to be productive, both partners need to get past themselves, listen carefully, and join together in telling a story that emerges from both, without preconception. You are co-creating in the moment. And hopefully having some fun along the way.

The exercise taught me that there is a difference between my story, and a story. There’s a difference between my story, and our story. And it’s not that my story is bad, or lacking, or not good enough. Refer to my earlier point about loving ourselves.

Each of us is beloved and has value and worth and beauty. You and I need to know who we are as individuals. We need to rejoice and celebrate in our particular, unique gifts that each person brings.

At the same time, we need to share and engage each other in relationship, and work together, respecting each other’s gifts. We co-create a new story, an emerging story. This can be exciting, and scary at the same time.

However your close relationships are organized, however community happens for you, despite and maybe because of our differences, the family still gathers around the table, as we will at the Holy Meal shortly. We reach out to make meaningful connections.

And perhaps this is the grace. Even though the people sitting around the proverbial table may be very different in their outlooks and interpretations and politics, we still gather and hear each other out. We practice being in community. And God continues to love each one of us, and the church.

Let us rejoice and give thanks in the story that God tells through us.

Thanks be to God!

The harvest is plentiful

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photo from http://www.elcic.ca (July 2025)

I started by searching for coastal scenes, and ocean waves crashing on pristine beaches. Over time, as I would scroll through these short reels, the images became more extreme, and I saw larger waves sometimes amplified with AI – surfers riding thirty-foot giant whitecaps crashing off the coast of Portugal. Then, boats capsizing in North Atlantic storms. Then, tsunamis plowing through Asian sea-side villages. And, just the last day, it was a beach scene, to be sure. But the folks on the beach witnessed a volcano violently erupt not far from their Pacific Ocean-side setting.

What happened to the serene, coastal, picturesque scenes at sunset?

Unfortunately, a quirk of human behaviour is that on average we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm (Hari, 2022). We call it negativity bias.

Our attention is captivated more by the gruesome details of an airplane crash than someone handing out flowers on a street corner, even though flowers are better for you to look at than mangled bodies. Social media knows this and capitalizes on it, because the business plan is to get your attention on screen for as long as possible, which increases the chance you will buy something.

These social media algorithms capitalize on our negativity bias at best, radicalization at worst.

A major study found that for every word of moral outrage you add to your social media feed, your retweet/share rate will go up 20 percent. Specifically, the words that will increase your share rate most are “attack,” “bad” and “blame”. In YouTube, for example, words such as “hates”, “obliterates”, “slams”, “destroys” will get picked up more frequently. If you fill your Facebook posts with indignant disagreement, you’ll double your likes and shares. So, the social media algorithms will prioritize outraging you and angering you. “If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging” (Hari, 2022, p. 131).

Should we be surprised, then, that when we read the bible, our negativity bias is already disproportionately stoked. What do we pick up first? What words or phrases do our eyes or ears dwell on? Which parts of scripture do we focus on?

He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Luke 10:2).

I caught myself lingering on, “The labourers are few.” We often kneejerk into seeing the negative, don’t we? And then from that negativity bias we believe that there is something wrong with us. “I am not good enough when I’m not labouring in God’s harvest,” we self-talk. “What’s wrong with me?”

The problem, we conclude, are individual flaws whose only solution requires individual tweaks. We are individually broken, and the solution is bucking up and doing the right thing. Each of us have to do this, individually.

Of course, each one of us can indeed do our part and improve our self-control and discipline. But that alone isn’t going to solve the problem. It’s like trying to run up a downward-moving escalator.

Sure, there are always the exceptions, individuals who will heroically sprint to the top. But the vast majority of us will never make it, even though we may be giving it all we’ve got. There are larger forces at work, mostly against us.

Regarding our screen addiction, the problem about saying we need individually to be more disciplined is that there are a thousand engineers on the other side of your screen working against you.

Yes, we should take out our phones and turn off our notifications. Yes, we need to figure out our individual triggers and get help. But the human family is up against an environment designed to invade and raid our focus and which, to put it kindly, is negatively affecting our social and political culture.

“The answer is individuals making better choices” is the cruel optimism the dominant culture dishes out. Cruel, because, in the end, it doesn’t change anything. We are still getting more distracted, and our brains are being adversely affected despite all the effort we dedicate to individual self-improvement.

It’s easy to despair. It’s easy to shrug our shoulders and conclude that there is nothing we can do about it. And complain about how bad the world is getting, how everything is just falling apart. And give up. And continue doom scrolling.

“So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

Let us persist in doing what is right. What does that look like? Doing the right thing?

“There’s the old metaphor that … villagers are at the river one day, and they notice a dead body come floating down the river. So they do the right thing. They take it out and they give it an appropriate burial. The next day two bodies come down the river and they do the appropriate thing and they bury the bodies. This goes on for a while, and finally they start to wonder – I wonder where these bodies are coming down the river [from], and if we should do something to stop that? So they go up the river to find out” (Hari, 2022, pp. 236-237).

The Gospel is not pouring pink on reality. It’s not pretending everything is fine when it is not. It’s not a cruel optimism the world dishes out, full of distraction and pretence. Nor is the Gospel about a doom and gloom, giving-up kind of despair for the world. Instead, the Gospel is about an authentic optimism.

That is where together, as a community, we build a solution that deals with underlying, systemic problems. That is where the church bands together to do the hard work, to go upriver.

In a few days, the ELCIC national convention will meet in Winnipeg. Among important tasks such as electing a new national bishop and vice chair, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women. We will commemorate some of the first women, such as Pamela McGee who was the first in 1976, to be ordained in the ELCIC (Riachi, 2025).

The mid-1970s witnessed a huge change in our church, and in society. Think about how it was for women in the 1960s, in contrast. In 1962, for example, there were no women in the British cabinet, the U.S. cabinet or the Swiss government at all (Hari, 2022). In Canada, the statistics are only slightly better. For example, Grace MacInnis was the only woman elected to Parliament in the 1968 general election. What changed?

The advances made happened not because individuals self-improved and overcame their personal, private hangups. The advances made happened because of an intentional, organized community doing the right thing for a better world.

The church took scripture seriously, such as Paul’s words to the Galatians we have heard in the last few weeks: “There is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14).

While we may celebrate 50 years of ordaining women in the ELCIC this year, so much sexism and misogyny remain, women still face huge barriers, and many of the advances that have been made continue to be under threat today. The work must continue.

Making a wrong right happen by a people working together to advocate and put pressure on the powers that be. The advances are made by a people who refuse to capitulate to the despair that nothing can be done about it. They don’t “grow weary”, as Paul’s words to us today encourage.

Why?

Because the harvest is plentiful. Because grace abounds. Yes, the world is a complicated and dangerous place. Yes, we face challenges to our wellbeing and health, every day.

But there’s another story in town. God’s presence fills the earth with beauty, light, life and love. There’s no stopping the goodness of God for all people. God’s persistence, God’s perseverance, God’s faithfulness never ends for all people. God doesn’t ever give up on us. God grants us what we need when we need it. And God’s gifts overflow.

The harvest is plentiful! That’s the truth. Thanks be to God.

References:

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can’t pay attention – and how to think deeply again. Random House.

Riachi, M. (2025, June). Rejoicing in hope: A preview to the ELCIC national convention. Canada Lutheran, 40(4), 10-14.