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.

He Finds Us Wherever We Are On The Blue Orb: A Homily For Easter Sunday

Preached at All Saints Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on April 5th, Easter Sunday.  Readings: Jeremiah  31:1-6, Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-8

Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?

I often try to begin a homily by trying to connect scripture with something happening in the world, but today I’m going to go outside the world.  Sometime tomorrow, on Easter Monday, the four human beings aboard the Artemis spacecraft will travel around the moon.   They will transit the moon’s dark side, the hemisphere that is forever turned away from the sun.  During this time the astronauts will be cut off from radio contact with earth, and as they travel around the moon, they may beat the record of Apollo 13 as travelleing the furthest away from Earth as anyone has ever been.  

Now I confess that like most preachers, I love a good metaphor, and as a child who was allowed to stay up and watch the moon landing, I’m a sucker for a space metaphor.   Last night at our Vigil service, Father Gordon spoke of the risen Jesus coming into the light.  The return of Artemis from the dark side of the moon, coming back into the sun’s light and regaining contact with home, can be one way of helping us understand the miracle of Easter Sunday.

After all, both the Easter story and the Artemis journey involve a large rock, on the far side of which is darkness and the unknown, and when it is rolled aside, or orbited, there is the return to light and reconnection.   It’s a tempting metaphor, but when we consider it, the differences are greater than the similarities, and those differences may help us understand Easter the better.

I’m not an engineer, but I’ve known enough of them to know that they are never happy until the unexpected and the possibility of failure are reduced as much as is humanly possible.  Mistakes are analyzed and improvements are made; think of the Challenger and the catastrophic failure of the O-rings.  The Artemis may well be the most over-engineered machine in human history.  It’s trajectory and the time of it’s return from the dark side of the sun will have been calculated to the second.   Countless hours will have been spent designing and planning to reduce risk and uncertainty.

The Resurrection of Jesus, however, is the triumph of the unexpected and the impossible over what humans then and now know to be real.   Jews believed that Elijah and Moses were taken up into heaven, but no one had been raised from the dead, unless you count Lazarus whom Jesus had raised. 

The chief priests worried that the body might be stolen and rumours of Jesus’ return might be spread, but they did not expect resurrection.  The disciples, scattered and demoralized, had not expected it.   As Fleming Rutledge puts it, they had seen their beloved master mocked, beaten, and “pinned up to die like an insect, an object of utmost contempt and public disgust”.   When Mary goes to the tomb in John’s gospel, she takes no expectations with her.  There is only her grief and her immense sorrow.

Ask anyone who has grieved, and they will tell you that death is terribly real.  If you’ve been with a loved one at the time of death, you will recall the moment that they were truly gone, and only the cooling shell was left.  I recall the moment I poured the ashes of my wife Kay into her favourite lake.   There was a brief swirl of dust on the surface of the water, and then nothing to say she was ever there.  Death is real.  Grief is real.  Absence is real.

If Easter is to be understood as the return of Jesus to life, then it will be rejected by anyone who values reason, evidence, and proof.  I’ve known many churchgoers, and some preachers, shy away from the actual resurrection because it seems so unbelievable.   It’s far easier to say that the disciples experienced some renewal of hope, some spiritual sense of communion with Jesus, than it is to say that the Jesus rose from the dead, stood before them, spoke to them, and comforted them.  I love John’s gospel for it’s account of the resurrection.   The focus is firmly on one person, Mary, and the terrible reality of her grief.   Several times she is described as “weeping”.   Jesus sees the weeping Mary and knows her, whereas she mistakes him for the gardener.   Perhaps her eyes were dim with tears, and certainly, to see her friend alive is the last thing she is expecting.   After all, no one in the gospels really understands what we understand, that Jesus has defeated death.  

We don’t know how Jesus speaks her name, “Mary” , though I like to imagine it is with affection, as one speaks to a friend.  And while his refusal to let her hold onto him is mysterious, there is a definite connection between the two.   I heard it said that Jesus may well long to hold her, but knows he can’t.  It’s a comforting thought.  But more comforting, I think, is the promise that Jesus’ return from the dead has created a new kinship and new connection to God:  “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”  So as is always the case with John’s gospel, there is deep theology, but there is also very personal and human relationship between the divine and the human.

Let me finish by returning briefly to our friends on Artemis.  On their way towards the moon, they discovered something that a previous generation of astronauts discovered.    The entire blue orb of the Earth in their capsule windows, a sight not seen by humans for many years.  As I listened to the NASA feed, I heard the crew speak in awe and humility of how the sight of earth reminded them of their common humanity and kinship with all the people back home.  In that moment of technological and scientifc achievement, they had what might be described as a mystical experience.

John’s gospel of course begins witb a similar cosmic mysticism.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.  He was with God from the beginning, through him all things were made”.  This “mighty word” as the hymn puts it can defeat sin and death, but still find the time to appear to and comfort his friend Mary.  Jesus has the time to do this, because all time is his, and as a shepherd, he will always seek out his own.

So if it comforts you, give yourself permission to think of yourself as Mary, with all of your burdens, whatever pains or sorrow yor loneliness you may carry.  You are just one human amidst the billions who live on that blue orb, and yet you are known to Jesus.  He is with you, as he is with you.   He calls you brother, sister, friend.  He is light, and he is love.   Death cannot hold him back, and death cannot keep you from him.  This Easter Sunday, as he does every day,  wherever we may be on the blue orb of the Earth that he created, Jesus comes to each of us,  as Saviour, brother, and friend, and he will always be with us, in the land of the living.