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“⁶I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. ⁹For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field …”^[1]

Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. So let me begin by talking about what Jessica loves. I believe she loves me, yes. But she also loves pineapples.

Yes, pineapples. Almost ten years ago, for a classroom experiment (but also because she loves pineapples), Jessica cut off the head of a pineapple—the part with the green stalk coming out from the top. For a week or so she left the top part sitting in a bowl of water until some tiny roots emerged. Then she planted it in a pot of earth. And left it.

At the start of the pandemic almost three years ago, she brought the plant home from the classroom. I was shocked to see that a woody stem had grown about two feet tall. But it needed to be supported by a stick to which it was tied. Otherwise, it would fall over. On top of the stem was a tuft of green leaves. And there were some leaves grouped together at the bottom near the earth. Kind of ugly.

Over the summer months we kept it inside, watered it and cared for it the best way we could. But nothing happened. It didn’t die. But it also did absolutely nothing. It didn’t grow more leaves or taller. 

So, without doing any research whatsoever I acted on my green thumb intuition. Big risk! I pruned it. I cut it off down to that bottom growth. And then continued watering it, keeping it by a sunny window and watching it grow over the past few years.

Then, I did the research, a little bit anyway. I learned that pineapples don’t actually grow on trees. They’re grown from the center of a leafy plant. The conditions for growing pineapples must be ‘just right’. Growing pineapples is a complex process and therefore most of it is done by hand. It is labour intensive, since there needs to be a high percentage of sunny days with temperatures between 18 and 35 degrees Celsius. If it’s too cool the taste will be sour. If it’s too hot, they’ll be extra sweet. They grow best in sandy, loamy soil. 

And those conditions are not perfectly met in our home. It’s now been at least a decade since Jessica started her experiment. And, while there is sign of life and growth in this journey, we still haven’t harvested our first pineapple from this plant.

Saint Paul writes in today’s Epistle reading that “God gives the growth”, and uses an organic, natural analogy to make the point that spiritual maturity and growth in Christ take time. Just like it takes a long time to grow anything—a tree, a plant—so, too, growing in faith is a process. It requires the long view.

Even if all the rules are followed, growing ‘by the law’ does not guarantee fulfillment in faith. Loving something cannot be done ‘by the book’, because it will be by nature an imperfect effort. In fact, I don’t believe we will ever harvest a single pineapple from our plant. But we continue labouring anyway, and we stick to it because love comes from the heart. And, you never know …

Paul concludes his sermon by telling the church in Corinth that “you are God’s field.” In the bible, we are called many things: sheep, Christ’s body, children of God. But here we find an interesting analogy: God’s field. We are the ground in which God’s plants are watered and nourished, and out of which grow the fruit of God’s purpose.

We are the field. In my first parish which was in the middle of southern Ontario farmland near Stratford, Jessica and I once visited friends on their farm in the Springtime. On a relatively dry day, we spent an afternoon walking on the fields which would be planted soon with soybean seeds. 

We picked stones. The frost of the winter brought to the surface rocks and stones. Farmers will sometimes go through their fields in Spring and remove the stones which they then pile along fence lines and corners of their properties.

Stone-picking is an arduous and painstaking task. You basically wander across the expanse of the field picking up the rocks into pails which when filled you need to dump along the side of fence. And go back and fill another pail. Talk about commitment to your land! It’s a work of love.

This is God’s work. God wanders through the wasteland of our lives, painstakingly picking up the rocks, pulling them from our “hearts of stone”. We are the field. God is the stone-picker. God is faithful, combing through the nether regions of our lives, working the field, year after year. Year after year.

It’s a process. Growth takes time, maybe even a lifetime. But God’s love and faithfulness never fail. God never fails at doing His part: forgiving us when we make mistakes—when we judge others, when we fail in our relationships, when we can’t love for whatever reasons.

God continues His work, turning the soil of our lives, showing mercy, being faithful, envisioning, and growing us to, the life we can have and will one day have, bearing abundant fruit.

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^[1] 1 Corinthians 3:6-9

At the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity my mind turns again to that word, ‘religion’. You might say that is the reason you are reading this blog. You want some ‘religion’. The root meaning of the word, religion, is to reconnect, re-align, hold together again. Like a ligament, religion connects all the pieces. 

You could say the purpose of religion is to unite all the parts. What has been separated, is brought back together again. To do religion is to work towards mending what is been torn apart.

We pray regularly for Christian unity, and for religious unity in families, among loved ones, in communities and churches. Our Lutheran^[1] church supports ecumenical initiatives. Especially locally as Faith Lutheran Church we have realized this effort in our relationship with Julian of Norwich Anglican Church and City View United Church in Ottawa, sharing worship services in the past few years.

So why do we do that? Why do we actively pursue visible, religious unity? In his sermon on the mount, Jesus says that “Blessed are the peacemakers.”^[2] God’s favour rests on those who work towards building relationships of trust, love, and compassion. 

But we know the divisions persist. History shows Christians have not often represented well the meaning of religion. Our egos get in the way. Defensive, reactive postures result in sometimes violent conflict. It is not a history of which we are proud:

The antisemitism in Martin Luther’s thought and writing, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust; going back further—the European Catholic-Protestant wars, the witch-hunts, the Crusades of earlier centuries – all justified by Christians.

Even today, considering the troubled history between Canadian settlers and the Indigenous, any good-intentioned efforts towards reconciliation with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are met with all kinds of resistance. Any call for Christian Unity, therefore, often drowns unfortunately in the sound of crickets. We, at best, hear this call with slightly jaded, skeptical and cynical hearts.

I remember in public school, vividly, a science experiment that left an impression on me. We mixed sodium bicarbonate with vinegar. Of course, the resulting agitation created a volcano of fizz. Later in my university days while enjoying some pretzels and beer with friends I learned that adding salt—lots of it—into beer encouraged carbon dioxide bubbles to cluster together and foam up. And I basically redid that third-grade science-project. 

But the erupting volcano eventually loses its fizz and settles down. The chemical reaction has run its course. In nature the elements that connect may initially become agitated in order to be true to their separate identities. But the reaction doesn’t last. And something new comes out of it.

Perhaps, our expectations and understanding of the word “Peace”—the peace of God—needs re-evaluation.

Because “God’s love is not just about playing nice and his peace is not without tensions. The Hebrew word, shalom, or ‘peace’, is not the absence of tension…”^[3] Shalom introduces the need for a right relationship to be established between different parts. And that process, like a chemical reaction, often begins in an agitated state, to say the least.

M. Scott Peck used the term “pseudo-unity” or “pseudo-community” to describe a group of people who want to be loving but withhold some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict.^[4] In a pseudo-community, members’ differences and grievances are minimized, even unacknowledged. On the surface they may appear to be functioning smoothly, but it is shallow. There is no real love and no real justice. Because avoidance of conflict is not a recipe for creating a healthy community in the long run.

During the season after Epiphany, Christians are called to look for signs like the Magi searched the skies of their world for a sign to lead them to the Messiah. What are the signs of God’s presence that can help point us in a direction of greater unity among different people? 

In 1989, Spanish born Jesuit priest, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría was assassinated in El Salvador. A martyr of the Christian faith, he preached that the sign to guide us is “the one … present in every age, in whose light all the others must be discarded and interpreted. That sign is always the historically crucified people.”^[5]

The sign is the Cross of Jesus. 

As much as Martin Luther had some harmful things to say, he also had much to say that was good. According to Luther, God was, and is, being revealed to us in suffering. In the vulnerability and pain of death on the cross, Jesus revealed the God who suffers alongside us wherever there is pain and suffering in the world.

The Cross was theologically vital not just to Luther but to the Apostle Paul before him. Paul, of course, is the central figure of the Acts of the Apostles and author of some of the earliest Christian writings and Epistles whose central theme is: “God’s power is shown in human weakness.”^[6]

In other words, we can know God when we first identify with our own suffering and weakness and when we own up to our fault in the matter. When we embrace our vulnerability and mortality as humans, we are ushered into the divine presence made known to us in Jesus Christ.

Moreover, when we perceive the suffering in the world, when we go to places of human tragedy, pain and dying, we again are ushered into the divine presence and enabled through ‘Grace Alone’^[7]. The grace comes in the trust we have in God who “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,”^[8] and whose gift of peace “surpasses all understanding.”^[9]

Peace from the bible is not warm fuzzies. Peace from the bible is more like salt-and-vinegar fizzies. Peace means right relationships. And striving for right relationships will cause tension. But the result of any chemical reaction is a changed reality. Growth brings change.

That is why, in my experience, Christian unity is best expressed when we get together to work in mission for justice. When we engage together in refugee sponsorship. When we work together to bring food we have prepared for those who have very little. When we pool our resources to provide affordable and safe housing for the homeless. When we invite neighbours to care for our garden so the food it produces can be shared in the Carlington Community. This list goes on. 

Peacemaking finds success in mission and justice work. Religious unity is realized in these efforts, reflecting the God of the cross, in Jesus and his love.

Some Christians worry that they’re getting their theology wrong if they engage with others who are different from them. I’m old enough now, to say, first, that it is impossible to know the mind of God. We will always have holes in our theology, no matter your background or denomination or history. But God will have mercy and forgiveness when we get it wrong.

What concerns us in this world of religion is if we get the whole showing compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love -thing wrong. Thankfully God never gives up on us. The experiment will happen again, and again. May we be true to our identities and bold in relating to others with open hearts, minds and loving spirits. And may we grow through the initial agitation that sometimes will happen, to see through it and into the kingdom of God.

God is faithful and God brings us together in bonds of love that can never be broken. Thanks be to God.

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^[1] Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) www.elcic.ca

^[2] Matthew 5:9

^[3] Adam Bucko, Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation (New York: Orbis Boos, 2022), p.121-122.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Cited in Bucko, ibid., p.123.

^[6] 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

^[7] One of the call-signs of the Reformation, and Luther’s theology, based on Saint Paul.

^[8] Ephesians 3:20

^[9] Philippians 4:7

During the pandemic I found myself waiting for the right time. The right time, for everything: I waited for the right time to make easy decisions about whether to wear a mask, whether to go to that concert, large indoor public setting, or sports event. I waited for the right time for experiencing life as ‘back to normal.’

It’s natural to want that, especially after any disruptive, traumatic experience. I was reading the firsthand account from Adam Bucko in New York city who lived through the trauma and aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He writes in his recent book:

“The horror and devastation are still very present with me, even now. I also remember that in the days following the tragedy, here in New York, glimmers of hope and resilience began to emerge. People spontaneously began gathering in public places, like Union Square in Manhattan, to commence impromptu public grieving ceremonies … 

“All of a sudden there seemed to be enough money to care for the poor. If you looked unwell, strangers would come up to you on the NYC subway and make sure that you were all right. Grief softened our hearts, and pain made us aware of other people’s suffering. There was a certain holiness in the air during those days. We were seeing with new eyes and hearing with new ears.

“But then, about two weeks after the tragedy, we were told that everything needed to go back to normal. Memorials were cleared out of public spaces. Public prayers were discouraged. To be normal, we were told, was to go shopping because that was good for our country. To be normal, we were told, was to cease congregating in public places. We were told to go back to normal and that we did.”^[1]

Over twenty years later and at the tail end of another traumatic, public event of this century, there are voices calling us to go back to normal. Big business, of course, wants us to believe that everything is back to normal. Watching the ads on TV or blockbuster movies filmed in the last couple of years you’d think there never was a pandemic. Even some churches operate as if the pandemic didn’t happen.

And, maybe, deep down inside of us all, including me, I want to believe it is back to normal and the time is right for responding to life and to God the way it used to be.

But the scriptures appointed for this season after Epiphany suggest that it is never a good time to respond in faith. There is no normal. No ‘right’ time from our perspective.

In the Gospel text for today^[2] Jesus calls the disciples to follow him. What is he calling them to do? To follow God’s call through the Holy Spirit. And this is a Holy Spirit who is described in scripture as blowing where it chooses, and no one knows where it’s coming from or where it’s going to.^[3]

Jesus is calling them to make a course-change in their lives which will significantly impact their personal and community relationships, to say the least, leaving behind family even.

Finally, Jesus is calling them to do something good for others in the mission of God. “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

One of the beliefs that gets in the way of following Jesus is that we do so on our own — by our own strength, using our own resources, depending on our individual minds alone. 

We are conditioned to believe in ourselves, conditioned by our culture, our upbringing, our schooling. Yes, we have to trust, believe in and love ourselves. God speaks and moves through us. But not alone! Love your neighbour is mentioned in the bible more often than love of self.

One of the mistakes I made in planning my pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago when I took a sabbatical six years ago was that I intended on travelling by myself. If I ever walk on that path again, I know now I need to do it with others alongside. Because we are not soloists in God’s choir.  We are not independent operators doing our own thing. We are not private contractors on this journey of faith. 

Following God calls us to step out of our private cocoons and work with others who are different from us. It is hard to trust in others and in God—and not just in ourselves. It’s never a good time when it isn’t easy.

I’m using the example of the pandemic to illustrate the idea that it’s never a good time. But we can apply that idea to other areas of life: That the call — the deep, resonant, voice of God may very well come to you at a bad time in your life.

The prophet Isaiah asserts that it is on those who have walked in great darkness that the light has shined; for those who have been in anguish there will be no gloom.^[4] It’s never a good time for epiphanies when they come in the midst of anguish and sorrow and letting go. But it starts there. In the grit and grind of living. And that’s where hope lies.

Like Isaiah, John the Baptist was a prophet announcing God’s reign. His area of work was confined to the Jordan River where he baptized anyone who showed up there.^[5] When Jesus heard John the prophet was imprisoned, Jesus continued the work that John started, but left the Jordan area and expanded the ministry to Galilee. The missional, centrifugal force of the work of Christ was beginning its ever-expanding circle of inclusion.

The very first words of Jesus when he begins his mission are: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God has come near.”^[6] Notice the sequence: Repent because the reign of God is already here. In contrast to John, Jesus announces a new strategy and ordering of things. 

First comes the presence of God. First comes the grace. First comes Jesus and his love. First comes healing, mercy, forgiveness.

The equation with Jesus has been turned on its head. The converting, the confessing, the personal growth come after love not before it. The converting comes after not before grace is first given. The Reign of God has come near.

The Reign of God puts things in perspective, a larger perspective. The Reign of God is not just about me-questions. The Reign of God has broad, societal implications. 

One translation of the Kingdom of God from the Latin, reads, “in light of eternity.”^[7] To consider things in light of eternity is a great clarifier. Seeing all things in light of eternity snaps us out of our distractions, delusions and narrow thinking. The perspective in the light of eternity pulls us out of a private religion, pulls us out of our comfort zones and our relentless pursuits of self-indulgence. 

It calls us to start with love for and grace with others rather than fear and judgement. Instead of retreating into our fortresses and behind barricades of mistrust and hate, the light of eternity calls us to trust life and trust others. And the signs are there, when we begin with love.

As difficult as it was during those first days, weeks and months of the pandemic, the signs were there. As they were in those first couple of weeks after 9-11 on the streets of Manhattan. Signs of love, compassion and community. During the early stages of the pandemic, neighbours gathered outside, over backyard fences. Do you remember? Climate scientists observed that the air in places like Los Angeles became almost crystal clear like never before. Do you remember? We slowed down our hectic pace. Do you remember?

These are the stars, the signs of Epiphany, guiding us to where Christ is born anew in this world. Are we listening? Are we watching?

It’s only ever the right time in retrospect. After all is said and done. At the end of the day, we can look back and recognize the signposts. At the end of the day, we can look back and recognize God’s hand in it all. At the end, we can affirm that all along, it was the right time. 

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^[1] Adam Bucko, Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation (New York: Orbis Books, 2022), p.93-94.

^[2] Matthew 4:12-23

^[3] John 3:8

^[4] Isaiah 9:1-2

^[5] Matthew 3:5-7

^[6] Matthew 4:17

^[7] sub specie aeternitatis = in light of eternity; Richard Rohr, “Big Picture Thinkers; Prophetic Truth” Daily Meditations (www.cac.org 16 January 2023).