How to Celebrate Our Birthday - June 13
How to celebrate our Birthday: Carolyn Smith, June 13, 2021
I bet last year, a minister creating something so techy, with all these other ministers being so techy, would have been impossible. But we ministers and church folk discovered life outside our walls and habits, following a daring Spirit out of our comfort zone to accomplish brave new things. The Servant Song sings of our purpose as Church, as disciples, creating a world as a God dreams it, walking the mile and bearing the load over these past 96 years since the Union of the United Church of Canada.
We celebrate this 96th anniversary, we say “Happy birthday!” - The United Church of Canada is on the frontier edge of change in Christianity - ordaining women in 1936, throwing open the doors to 2S and LGBTQIA people, offering the first Church Apology to Indigenous people, creating Intercultural and Interfaith and Indigenous Ministries that have build bridges and even offer healing as vibrant efforts of our denomination. I can’t imagine serving in any other denomination. But this month, we must hold up the other hand and acknowledge the United Church of Canada’s complicity in running Residential Schools, In “civilizing” society to our anglo-centric, settler-centric way, in minimizing other faiths and cultures like our Muslim neighbours and the racialized or “othered” people on our edges. We hear about the big ways, but it happens every day in small persistent ways. Just as some of us cringed a bit when we didn’t understand the French lyrics in that last song, try to be com-passionate with - know the feelings of - the friends in our circle here singing hymns in English week after week for whom English is not their first language. Just as I cringed seeing that first image of our United Church Union - of a church of with stuffy white settler Men - be com-passionate - to “feel with” the experience of anyone different. Indeed, reflect back on that era of Canada - no one was elevated to a government position without likely being a fine-upstanding mainline Church member, the trustees and superintendents and
deacons of our churches became our MPs and Prime Ministers and Corporations. Our United Church was created by an Act of Parliament. Times have changed, but we are rooted deeply.
A lot has changed for the better, thanks be to God. Many of us have loved our church communities!! We have shining moments to celebrate! But some of those moments took a long long time and some are still playing out. I am glad you are here with me walking this road, nurturing friendships, and still inspired in some way by the Spirit and way of Jesus who broke down every barrier and turned the world on its head. This past 2 weeks, I watched an Indigenous Anglican minister take off her collar and commit to changing the church before she puts it back on. I myself have been smacked down by the outpouring of anger and pain of Indigenous advocates who don’t understand my Church, and they don’t need to. After decades of them being diminished in the shadow of the church and government, I humbly take my turn to feel discomfort and still elevate their voices. And my option would be to give up serving, to throw up my hands in frustration, retreat to what is comfortable and familiar for me. Except that breaks my heart. It should break our hearts. For the painful history we hold in this hand, allow O God our hearts to be broken.
The Gospel of John says: Jesus took off his robe and tied a towel around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet. He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord— So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should do as I have done to you.
Now that it’s summer, you can understand the foot thing here..... I wear sandals a lot, which means dirty feet and sometimes dry, painful cracked skin. Feet aren’t known to smell like roses either. Jesus, and his whole culture lived in sandals and walked dusty roads and had sore, tired feet. A utmost act of hospitality was to
have one’s servants tend to the guests, bathing and moisturizing their feet. It meant kneeling down, tending to an intimate level of hygiene, up-close and personal. Taking cracked sore smelly feet in ones hands. Uncomfortable, perhaps even humiliating. But what a gift to the guest.
I am not sure if this story of Jesus happened this way or not, and I know I am not being asked to come wash your feet, but I know this story is true. My leadership and my actions- my discipleship - is nothing if I am not up close and personal with you and the world around me. It is not humiliating. It is humbling, and to make sense of that difference, at its core, and to overcome it, means to learn and serve with compassion and love. I don’t always find it easy. Fear and discomfort has us shy away from empathy and trust when it costs something of us.
We use the word Ally often in our Affirming journey and our work for racial justice. To be an ally is support transforming justice publicly, intentionally, explicitly. To be a trusted friend or partner in supporting one who is oppressed until they are liberated and equal. To be an ally is something like Discipleship - if you read stories of the disciples, they follow Jesus in turning the structure upside down even when it’s hard and it would cost them, and they mess up and say the wrong things, but try again. They are the straight man for Jesus’ punch line, so we can hear the wisdom. And despite the discomfort, they are there til the end and beyond. Being an ally is an every day choice, every situation and opportunity - it is not a title I claim for myself but one that is bestowed on me from time to time. It is humbling, and an honour. Pam Rocker who spoke to us last fall as an LGBTQ2SIA speaker and one-time Church leader suggested that we who have the comfort, and centrality, if you will, of the church, if we give up a bit of our comfort - we make room for others to be more comfortable. If those who have the comfort can courageously and faithfully offer up a wee bit of it in service to others,
- to hear and feel and be com-passionate with new stories, this is not humiliating, this is approaching a new church of allyship.
We were all made different so we can learn from each other. To those of you who feel different - in ability, race, language, background or otherwise- I honour the courage you show when you have taught others, shared your story, and forgiven me my clumsiness. That sometimes requires a lot of energy from you. If we have been privileged to be surrounded by like-minded and like-skinned and like-spirited people, we have been comfortable, but we are late to the adventure of this sacred diverse world. Don’t waste another moment! But how?? I hear some of you saying that, and I too say “I’m not sure” but time and again what I am told, is that it is good enough to just start with learning. Read one of those books you’re going to buy for the library. Yes you! Turn to the Indigenous News on the CBC, or try Al Jazeera. Come join us this week with Kerr Street Mission learning to be part of the Neighbour Care network. You can reach out with love. This week I sent a timid note to my Syrian Muslim friends to say “I was horrified by the murder in London, and I don’t know what to say except that I care about you.” It feels a bit like kneeling at their aching feet, humbled, quiet.
It isn’t easy to, as the Servant song says, to walk the mile and bear the load, to share the joy and sorrow til we’ve seen the journey through.”
We weren’t called to EASY discipleship - though in prayer and in courage, it is right and good.
We sang together “Brother let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you. Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”
In grace, in courage, may we see this journey through, together. Amen.