St. Paul’s United
Church Sunday, January 4, 2009
Mapquest – Rev. David Mundy
Isaiah 60:1-6 Matthew 2:1-12
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Did you get where you needed to go through the Christmas season? I
certainly hope so, especially in light of the weather in the days leading up to
Christmas day. We saw the snowstorms across the country that gave us all a
white Christmas also played havoc with air travel.
At least those of us behind the wheel of a car have a number of
navigational devices to help us these days that didn’t exist a decade ago, at
least not for the average traveller. Some of you may use a GPS, a global
positioning system, to guide you around and they are amazing little gizmos. We
don’t have one, but friends brought theirs along on a trip to Toronto a couple
of months ago. I was driving and this thing kept talking to me, telling me when
to turn and what road to look for. The only problem was that it wanted to take
me on the most direct route, geographically, but it didn’t know the best route. I kept telling it to “pipe down” because I
wasn’t going to do what it told me. It’s a guy thing!
There are also tools such as Goggle Maps and Marques to get us where we
want to go. Through the internet a traveller can get detailed instructions to
print out for a journey. I have used
these to find parishioners who are off the beaten track and it has been very
helpful. So, you can run, but you can’t hide.
There are no guarantees that we can’t get lost because many of us are
quite ingenious that way (unfortunately we can’t download common sense), but
these technological tools sure can make a difference. And there are still some
people who can find their way by using a compass, or the stars.
This morning we heard the passages of scripture which are for the day of
Epiphany on January 6th because this is the closest Sunday. One of
them is from the gospel of Matthew, the only gospel that tells us of the quest
for Jesus by visitors from the east who follow a star, or some heavenly body.
You will have heard over the years that these Magi or “Wise Guys” were
followers of the Zoroastrian religion and they were both astrologers and
astronomers. In ancient times religion and science were often interwoven, and
we know that the Magi studied the stars for auspicious signs and portents.
Many Nativity scenes include the Magi even though they weren’t really
part of the time frame of Jesus’ birth. Scholars speculate that they would have
shown up when Jesus was a toddler and even older, so the angels and the
shepherds would have been long-gone. Through the centuries artists have
confused the issue by portraying the arrival of the Magi at the stable where
Jesus was born. There is a rather overblown painting called The Adoration of
the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens which shows an infant Jesus and the animals
around the manger. I prefer James Tissot’s Journey
of the Magi which conveys the sense of travelling through rough and
forbidding territory to find the one promised in the Hebrew scriptures.
Isn’t it interesting that while the gospels don’t say anything about farm
critters at the manger we put them there, and even though there is no mention
of camels we throw them in as well?
Our gospel reading from Matthew tells us that even though the Magi did
not have a map directing them toward the place where Jesus and his family were
living they did have a destination and that destination was actually a person
who was “the child born to be king of the Jews.” The Magi were not just on a
vague spiritual journey. This is a story of travellers who used all the skills
available to them, some of them passed from generation to generation, to get
where they wanted to go.
As we enter into a new year with all its promise, it’s important to be
reminded that we are both on a spiritual journey, seeking meaning in our lives,
and that as Christians, we are specific in our quest for the Promised One, the
Christ.
If you have ever used tools such as Mapquest
or a GPS you know that you simply aren’t allowed to be vague in your
co-ordinates. You have to enter a specific starting point and a specific
destination in order to get information about your route. Even if we use an
old-fashioned compass or look to the stars we must have some idea of where we
want to end up.
Can we apply this to our spiritual journey as well? We live in a time
when there is a fair amount of indifference and disdain for organized religion,
so many people claim to being “spiritual without being religious.” And I wish I had a Loonie
for every time someone told me that they don’t feel they need to go to church
to be a good person, or that the spiritual journey is more important than the destinatinon. My inclination is not to argue, although I do
see that a fair number of people ending up fumbling around rather aimlessly in
a personal quest for spiritual truths. Perhaps because we are afraid of coming
across as too religious some Christian churches have tended to be less specific
in the way the message of faith is presented, although we are starting to do
some major soul-searching about the outcome.
Bill Hybels is the founder and lead pastor in
one of the most successful churches in the United States, if success is
measured by numbers. Willow Creek church has thousands of worshippers every
Sunday and coined the phrase “seeker sensitive” to describe those who may have
drifted away from organized religion and needed to be an attracted back into
the fold by worship and activities which are less traditional and more
accessible. So the music is very upbeat and the language used in worship is
straightforward and people are encouraged to come dressed casually – they can
even pick up their morning coffee as they head into the sanctuary.
This approach has worked so well that even though Willow Creek is fairly
evangelical in its outlook it has been carefully studied by other churches and
actually made it onto the cover of our United Church magazine with an article
called The Willow Creek Way. Church leaders everywhere want to know how
this massive congregation has “bucked the trend” of declining attendance with
impressive growth and vitality. Could they get a copy of the map for success?
Yet Bill Hybels is not satisfied with
numerical growth alone. Last year he surprised those who watch and admire him
with an admission that the seeker sensitive movement might not be enough, that
there needs to be a deepening and maturing faith that go beyond the “numbers
game.”
In the promotion for a Willow Creek’s new book on the subject of
spiritual practice and growth we read:
Do
you ever lie awake at night wondering . . . Do our programs really help people
grow? Are we putting our resources into ministries that genuinely change lives?
Are we helping people become more like Christ, or just keeping them busy? For
years, church leaders have relied on numbers to help answer questions like
these. In other words, we ask the "How many?" question . . . Numbers
can be helpful, but they don't reveal the whole story. Numbers can't peer into
the human heart. When it comes to spiritual growth, we need to be able to
measure more than numbers. We need a glimpse of people's attitudes, thoughts
and emotions. We need a tool that reveals the heart of each person.
I think this caught my attention because I do literally lie awake at
night wondering whether we do enough to get to “the heart” of what it means to
be Christian. This came close to home over the holidays when I was at a family
gathering that included a nephew who is in his later twenties and is unusual in
that he never left the church. Mike is the youngest person in his United Church
congregation’s choir and is active in other areas of congregational life. Mike
is an affable guy with whom I have never “talked religion” but this time around
he told me that he is on an intense spiritual quest at the moment, doing more
reading about his faith than he has ever done on any subject. He has realized
that, despite his lifelong involvement in the church, his spiritual growth
“stalled” once he stopped attending Sunday School. For
all his activity, he hasn’t attended a bible study or had a serious
conversation about Christ until he began chatting with another member of the
choir – hopefully not during the sermon!
Of course I encouraged him in his quest and wrote down some suggestions
for reading, but he may be indicative of many of us in the church. We become so
involved in the constant activity of church life that we miss the fact that we
are here to develop a relationship with the Christ who is the reason for the
existence of our community and who sustains us and nourishes us in our
spiritual growth. We can actually miss
the fact that our growth in faith has been stunted by our business.
The encouraging news is that we can choose to be people of spiritual
depth and Christian “destination.” It is within the community of Christ that we
learn the practices of faith which will help us be stronger, more discerning, more faith-full in the events of everyday.
There is a movement called Practicing Our Faith which invites
Christians to go deeper, focussing on a dozen spiritual practices which are not
the definitive list, but a beginning.
Keeping Sabbath
Saying Yes and Saying No
Honouring the Body
Hospitality
Discernment
Household Economics
Forgiveness
Shaping Communities
Healing
Testimony
Singing our Lives
Dying Well
Some of these we have addressed along the way in worship and could
probably do so again. For the next six weeks though, Rev. Cathy Russell and I
will look at the six of these important disciplines or practices on Sunday
mornings.
As we enter a new year I hope you will accept the challenge of living
the quest to discover Christ in a way that is fresh and meaningful which will
lead to personal renewal and a commitment to justice in our world. Surely every
one of us can choose at least one way to deepen our faith during the next
twelve months.
Finally, I want to applaud the fact that you got up and found your way
to church this morning. At the same time, all of us –clergy included– can
acknowledge that we aren’t just coming to church, we
are participating in the community of those who are both seeking and finding
Christ. Thank God that our quest continues and we can arrive at our destination
of faith.