Don't Look Up: A Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, on May 17, 2026, the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Yr A).  Texts for this Sunday: Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

 “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" (Acts 1:11)

In my experience it’s rare to hear sermons on the psalms and what they teach us.  Of our four scripture readings every Sunday, I suspect the psalm is the least memorable of these readings, even though we actively participate in it by speaking and singing.  So today I’d like to spend some time on our psalm, to ask why it’s included in our readings for this Sunday, to ask what it can teach us, and to ask how we might pray it, because the psalms are, and can be used as, prayers.

The opening of the psalm makes me uncomfortable:  “let his enemies be scattered; /let those who hate him flee before him”

That verse sounds very similar to some of the recent horrifying statements coming out of the US/Iran war, that the US military operates under “divine protection”, and that God justifies and approves of  “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.  As a military chaplain, I would have been appalled by any colleague who said such a prayer.  

On the other hand, it’s been gratifying to hear no less than the Pope weigh in.  On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo said that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.  I remember a line from the Beatitudes, “blessed are the peacemakers”, but I can’ “blessed are the warfighters”.  Most of us would agree that war should always be a last resort, a necessary evil.  So what are we to do with the warlike language in today’s psalm?  Why do we pray it?

As I like to point out in our bible studies, the readings we hear in church are chosen according to the time of the Christian year and they are often ways to help us understand the theme of a particular Sunday.  This psalm is heard on the Sunday following Ascension Day, which was last Thursday (Ascension is always celebrated forty days after Easter and ten days before Pentecost).   The verse about God who “rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens” makes a connection with the end of Jesus’ time with his friends.  As we heard in our first reading from Acts, “[Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (1:9).

But the Jesus who ascended into the heavens did not scatter his enemies before him.  Jesus won victory over his enemies through love and through the self-sacrifice of the cross, and not through the warmaking of the Old Testament.  So how do we reconcile this contradiction?

Another point I like to make in bible studies is that scripture reflects God helping God’s people to grow and change.   Ancient Israeil lived in a sharkpit, surrounded by agressive and cruel imperial powers.  The warlike language in the beginning of today’s psalm reflects a longing for a King David figure who will conquer Israel’s enemies.    This longing persists into Jesus’ time.   In our first lesson, the disciples ask the risen Jesus if his resurrection is the signal for a return to glory:  “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1.6).

Jesus’ response starts off curtly, but opens into a different reality than the worldly power politics that the disciples (and we in our time) are familiar with.  The kingdom of God, Jesus says, will be the work of the Holy Spirit, which will enable his followers to go to all places and preach the gospel of peace, love, and justice for all people.  And to be fair to the psalm, we find that God’s intentions have always been inclined this way.  The psalmist portrays God’s kingdom, once it is established as a place of peace and justice:

Father of orphans and protector of widows
    is God in his holy habitation.

God gives the desolate a home to live in;
    he leads out the prisoners to prosperity,  (Ps 68.5-6)

It’s this kind of language that makes me feel protective of the Old Testament.  We sometimes thing that the Old and New Testaments are radically different, but love, peace and justice were not just invented by Jesus.  When Jesus preaches his first sermon in Nazareth, he quotes the prophet Isaiah whose language closely mirrors today’s psalm:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk 4:18-19)

Both the psalm and our first lesson end with a vision of a gathering of faithful people.  The psalm ends with a vision of the temple, where God “in his sanctuary … gives power and strength to his people” (Ps 68:35).  The reading from Acts ends with the disciples gathered together to pray as they seek to know the will of God.  Both these scenes are kinds of templates or directions for the church.   

The two men in white tell the disciples to stop looking upwards.    Up is not really a helpful direction for God’s people.   Up suggests a distant place where God and Jesus live, far above us.   The Ascension story is actually about God promising to send power downwards, to the disciples, so they can look around and see who needs to hear the gospel of peace and justice.    If we are busy looking upwards, we fail to see the people right in front of us, the hungry and the downtrodden, who need our help.

The lesson of Ascension is to resist the temptation to want an angry sky god who will rain destruction on our enemies.  That’s the delusion of Christian nationalism, to see a God who blesses violence against those not like us.    The book of Acts begins with a call to bring all nations together, to be united in God’s love as Jesus prays that the disciples may be one.   Jesus’ promises us that he will protect us, not through bombs and missiles and drones, but by the Holy Spirit of love and unity that turns us away from the angry sky god.   We can thus pray this psalm as a request for help that we not look up, but rather look around,  so we can see Christ in the people beside us, right here on earth.

Gods Seen and Unseen: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, and Good Shepherd, Stayner, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, 10 May, 2026.

Text for this Sunday: Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown God.’  (Acts 17:22-23)

 

Last Monday was May 4, and I’m wondering, on that day did anyone say “May the Fourth” be with you?   Or, did you notice that people on social media were talking a lot about Star Wars?

May the Fourth in popular culture has now become known by those in the know as Star Wars Day, because when you say the date, it sounds a lot like the famous phrase from the Star Wars movies, “May the Force be with you”.  In the imaginary universe of Star Wars, the Force is a kind of living energy that animates the galaxy.  

The Force can be used for good, especially by practitioners called The Jedi who vaguely resemble Buddhist monks, who say “May the Force be with you” as a kind of blessing.   (Fun fact, when an Anglican Jedi says this, everyone else has to say “And also with you”.   But the power of the force can also be used for evil purposes, most famously by the arch-villain of the Star Wars films, Darth Vader.   So even though the Star Wars franchise seems to be about spaceships, cute aliens, and selling toys, it’s also a spiritual story about the battle between good and evil, and it asks questions about morality.   Seemingly good characters can be corrupted, but can also be redeemed.

Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon shows how people are willing to believe all sorts of things. As people in North America and the West become less Christian, they still find ways to form and practice spiritual beliefs.   

For decades some people have indicated their belief on census forms as Jedi and have sought, perhaps not always seriously, to have Jediism recognized as an official religion.   And they’re not alone.  Some people, mostly in the millenial and post-millenial cohorts, find deep meaning and morality in online computer games such as Mass Effect.  What these beliefs and spiritualites have in common is that they are not linked to ancient religious traditions.   They are what social scientists call New Religions.

Scientology as a belief system and even as a religion has existed for decades.  More recently, some advocates of Artificial Intelligence  have started expressing their faith in the promise of AI in deeply spiritual ways.  Transhumanism, for example, is the hope that human consciousness can exist and evolve in digital form, free from the limits of the human body, and thus attain a kind of immortality.   Other AI super-believers imagine a future where humans live in a kind of technological paradise.   Either way, say scholars, there is a religious dimension to many attitudes about AI.

For those of us who are baby boomers, we’ve seen amazing changes in religion and spirituality in our lifetimes.   When we were growing up, Canada was a Christian country.   Over the decades, as we became a multicultural country, we became more familiar with Islam, Hinduism, and other world religions because they were our neighbours and coworkers.   Then, as our adult children fell away from church, we became a more secular country.   And now we’re in a strange, pluralistic kind of landscape where people are more likely to say they are spiritual than they are to say that they’re religious.

In some ways, if you took St Paul out of our first reading from Acts and dropped him down in 21st century Ontario, I think he would find himself at home.  Our world, at least spiritually, has similarities to the ancient world, and the way that Paul speaks to the Greeks in Athens gives us some clues as to how we as Christians can dialogue with people today who don’t share our beliefs but who do have beliefs of their own.   Let’s dive into Acts and see how it might help us today.

By this point in the book of Acts, Paul has travelled to the Greek city of Athens, which was famous as a place of learning and philosophy, but was also a place of spirituality.  Besides the Greek gods that we might all remember from mythology books, Paul finds an altar dedicated to “an unknown God”.  Perhaps the Athenians were hedging their bets.  We can imagine the Athenians thinking,  “if there are gods out there who haven’t introduced themselves, it’s a good idea to worship them, just so we don’t miss out on any blessings or benefits”.

Paul’s attitude is respectul but perhaps there’s a little humour when he says, basically, “Wow, you guys are super religious”.  But he doesn’t condemn the Greeks for being pagans.  He finds some common ground between their beliefs and his, specifically the shared belief that God/gods created the earth and “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts .   He also points out that there is a common impulse among people to “search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:  

But there is a key difference that Paul wants to make, and that is the difference between unknown and known.  Paul knows God personally.  He encountered Jesus when he was still Saul, persecuting Jesus’ followers, and he became Paul, a messenger of Jesus.   As a Jew and a Pharisee, Paul also knows that Jesus’ father has always wanted to be known, and has revealed over and over again: to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets. and finally God sent his son, “a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

Paul could have started with Jesus, and condemned the Greeks right off the bat, but he respectfully looked for common ground, got to know the Greeks by looking around their city, and refused to condemn them.   But Paul knows Jesus and he knows what he believes, and he isn’t ashamed of his message.    And, we are told, he doesn’t convince all the Greeks (some “scoffed”), but others are curious and want to learn more.

Last Sunday, in the Gospel reading from John, we heard Jesus say that "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:  ).  In our bible study at All Saints, we had a lively discussion about this verse and how it is often used by some Christians in a very exclusivist way, to invalidate all other forms of belief as being false and untrue.  We agreed that for us as followers of Jesus, we do believe that he speaks truth, that he is the way that we know God, and he is worth following.    So how do we communicate our belief to others in a respectful and non-judgemental way?

In my own experience as a military chaplain, working with believers from other world religions, like Jews and Muslims, it was clear to me that they respected the truth of my beliefs, but they were equally committed to their truths and beliefs.   Recognizing that we both held a truth was enough.  We didn’t try to convert one another.

But what if you are talking to a friend or neighbour who believes that certain crystals or sounds have healing powers, or who puts statues of angels in their garden for protection?  What if the person believes that trees are sacred, or that Mother Earth is a goddess?   What if  the other person finds their spirituality through yoga, or through cheering for the Leafs (now that would be a person of faith!).  

Again, the story of Paul in Acts is I think helpful.  It shows us that most people are searching and groping for something, some higher meaning.  It teaches us to be respectful and to learn about others’ beliefs.  And it teaches us  for our part to be true to what we believe, that Jesus is our truth, our life, and our way to God.  We believe in Jesus, because we know Jesus and we know that Jesus has always believed in us.

Wonders and Signs: Seeing The Church For What It Is

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 26 April, 2025.  Readings for this Sunday:  Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.”  (Acts 2.43)

Coming back to the pulpit after two Sundays’ vacation after Easter makes me feel a little like Thomas the Disciple in John’s gospel, wandering in and going “Hey guys, anything happen while I was away?”

Joy and I had a very pleasant and restful vacation and now I’m back and there is still just as much work as when I left:  meetings, grant applications, diocesan paperwork, and all the usual business.   Ask any of our devoted wardens, our staff and lay ministers, or our volunteers, and they will all agree that doing church is time-consuming and often tiring.

Sometimes, to be honest, it can all be a little ridiculous.   You often hear the term “churchland” to refer to the petty conflcts, squabbles, and displays of ego that can arise in any community or organization.   People will look at each other, chuckle, and say something like “that’s churchland for you”.  And, lest you think this is anything new, may I refer you to St Paul’s complaints to the Corinthian Christians?  Church is as church was, a grouping of sinful and imperfect people following Jesus as best we can.

I wonder, sometimes, if our experiences of the daily and weekly grind of church, or even the negative and sometimes harmful moments of our church life, can dull us to the beautiful and amazing things that God can do,  and does do, in our midst.   In our first reading from Acts, which describes the very first days of the church in Jerusalem following the miracle of Pentecost, we hear that “Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles” (Acts 2.43).

Now we might say that that was then, the miracles of that mass appearance of the Holy Spirit — the tongues of fire, the speaking of many languages, the preaching that led to three thousand becoming believers in one day — was a one time, formative experience, a spiritual Big Bang.  Well, yes, in a sense.  Jesus did tell his friends to go out and preach, and he did promise them that the Holy Spirit would guide them and equip them, and that is waht we see in Acts.   But, if we think that there was an age of miracles, and then God and the Holy Spirit left us alone, then I think we are missing out on the best part of church.

In her book Why Gather? The Hope and Promise of the Church, Canon Martha Tatarnic challenges us to be confident that God is working in the Church, that Jesus is with us, and that the Spirit is empowering and leading us.    When is the last time you looked around All Saints and felt awe at the “many wonders and signs being done here”?   I hope it was recently, because I see wonders and signs all the time.  Let me give you some examples.

Just before Easter, at our Community Dinner, we seated over a hundred guests.  In fact, we had to put out extra tables.   Our volunteers, some of them otherwise unaffiliated with All Sants, came through as they always do.   We didn’t run out of food.   People left satisfied.    Over Holy Week and Easter, over two hundred people came through our doors to worship and to meet the risen Christ.     People come through our doors on Thursdays for CO3 because we offer them a respite from violence, cold and poverty.

I see wonders and signs whenever I look over at our hardworking tech team and think of what they make happen.    Just before Easter, I visited a parishioner in hospital.  She hasn’t attended in years for health reasons, but our livestream keeps her connected with our worship and preaching.  Likewise, I think of the lady in ICU at the end of her life;  her daughter held a tablet so she could watch the service, she heard her name in the prayers of the people, closed her eyes, smiled, and went home to our Lord.  These things happen because faithful and generous parishioners invested in our technology and our volunteers make that tech work.  To me these things all fall in the “wonders and signs” category. 

If our first reading encourages us to be excited again about what God is doing in the life of our church, it also encourages us to think about the purpose of the church.  Acts tells us that the early church prayed together, ate together, and supported one another, to the point where “they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”.  Now I suspect that my friends in the Stewardship Committee would not want to go out on a limb and urgeus to do the same, but it is worth asking why the earliest believers would go so far as to sell all they had and live in such generosity,

As I’ve said before, the ancient world was a place of huge inequalities, where most people lived in poverty at or just above the subsistence level.   For these first believers in Jerusalem, they also lived as a conquered part of an empire that was dedicated to the ruthless and violent extraction of taxes and resources.  What the Spirit created in this first church community was the opposite of empire, a real glimpse of the kingdom of God on earth.    In the Beatitudes, Jesus says that “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20).   

The church then and now is that outpost of the kingdom of God that, in true Beatitude fashion, overturns the hierarchical values of empire.  Those empire values persist today in all sorts of ways:

fear of the outsider, turning housing into wealth and demonizing the homeless, celebrations of technology and violence that negate our common humanity .. the list, sadly, goes on.   The church then and now, if the church is worth its salt, is the place where the values of the kingdom of heaven are lived in common.   

In our gospel reading today we heard Jesus, somewhat confusingly, refer to himself both as the shepherd and the gate, but both metaphors have the same meaning, in that they both point to Jesus as the one who keeps the sheep safe.   When I’ve heard this gospel preached, it’s often to say that we are the sheep, which is true, but I wonder if we shouldn’t also think of the church as the sheepfold.    The church after all is, or should be, a safe place where all are welcomed and valued, and where the values of the kingdom of God are lived out.    To find such a church, indeed, to be part of such a church, should surely cause awe, wonder, and joy in an increasingly dark and uncertain world.  So my friends, let us see and  treasure the work that God is doing here at All Saints, is doing in our regional ministry, and is doing in the church at large.