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St. John's
Fort Qu'Appelle
St. Cuthbert's
Dysart
St. Mary's
Cupar

Everyone Welcome!


Service Time

1st Sunday of the month
11 amEucharistSt.Mary's, Cupar
11 amEucharistSt.John's, Fort Qu'Appelle
2st Sunday of the month
9 amEucharistSt.Cuthbert's, Dysart
11 amEucharistSt.John's, Fort Qu'Appelle
3st Sunday of the month
9 amEucharistSt.Mary's, Cupar
11 amEucharistSt.John's, Fort Qu'Appelle
4st Sunday of the month
9 amEucharistSt.Cuthbert's, Dysart
11 amEucharistSt.John's, Fort Qu'Appelle
5st Sunday (some months)
11 amEucharist and Pot Luck Lunch following.
The service rotates through the three churches.

For more detailed information about the month's services, contact Rev. Mary Gavin or see The Parish in Print monthly newsletter.

Sermon of the week: April 12, 2009
(Biblical readings; Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Mark 16:1-8)

Easter Sunday
Mary Gavin

It is so wonderful to be celebrating baptisms this morning as part of our Easter service. The connection between Easter and baptism goes way back to the early church, and for very good reason. The symbolism of baptism brings us right into the death and resurrection of Jesus, right into the great spiritual truth that when we are baptized we die to our old way of life and rise into a new life in Christ.

Now, if we lived in a warmer climate—like the Mediterranean world where Christianity started out—we could take these two babies down to the lake or the river and immerse them, which is again how baptism was done in the early church. Remember, Jesus himself was baptized in a river. But we don’t want these two little fellows to get pneumonia, so I think it’s not a great idea to go down to the lake and chop away the ice just to be true to early tradition. And our baptismal font here is not big enough to recreate that kind of experience. It’s important for us to remember it, though: to be aware that the water we pour this morning is symbolically connected to that experience of being held under for a bit; to form a mental picture of the newly baptized person coming up dripping wet and ready to look at all of life from a new point of view.

Those of us here who are already baptized have the opportunity today to revisit and renew our own passage to new life in Christ. In a little bit, when Aaron and Shawn’s parents and godparents renounce evil in all its forms and commit the two children to Christ, we are reminded that similar renunciations and a similar commitment were made by ourselves, if we were baptized as adults, or by our godparents on our behalf, if we were baptized when we were small.

Then, we will all be encouraged to renew our own baptismal covenant along with these two newest members of the community of faith. That covenant is a summary of the story of our faith, the creed, and of what it means to live as Christians, the promises that follow. We affirm our intention to carry out those promises, always with God’s help, since we know it’s more than we can do by ourselves. And part of the reason that the baptismal covenant can seem so daunting is that it really is about living a new life, living by values that are not always evident in the culture around us.

We promise, in this covenant, to devote time and energy to prayer, to being with the Christian community in fellowship and worship. We promise to resist evil, which means paying attention to how we are tempted to fall into it, taking care to notice when the world around us promotes values that are not the values of God’s kingdom. We promise to respond to the needs of others, to work for peace and justice, to share our faith in word and action. These promises are about setting priorities in our lives, and it’s not easy.

Just because the Christian life is not easy, it’s good for all of us to renew that covenant from time to time. We need the reminder. But today, when we are bringing new members into God’s household, there is something else going on as well. We are expressing our common purpose with these children, and we also make the additional promise that we will support them in their journey. Supporting them also means that we will support their families.

New parents often depend upon experienced parents for advice about the practical stuff like colic and teething and potty training. That’s how the wisdom of experience gets handed down. No new mother or father is equipped to handle all the demands of parenting without getting advice from somewhere. The only way to learn is on the job, and if you only learn by your own trial and error, bad things can happen to the child along the way. You love your child, and you don’t want to hurt them or mess them up, so you ask for help.

The same thing is true in the child’s spiritual life. How do you teach a child to pray? What do you tell them about God? How can you pass on the Christian values that are important in your own life? To some extent, you might remember what your own parents did and try to recreate the things that worked and avoid the ones that didn’t. But you can also call on experienced believers (who are mostly also experienced parents or teachers) for help. We promise today to give you that help. It’s part of our mission to nurture new believers. None of us should ever feel that we have to go it all alone.

Not only do we have the help of other believers, but we call on God’s grace, on Jesus who lives within us and among us. That’s another connection to this feast of Easter. We are celebrating how we have learned by faith to find Jesus still here, alive in a whole new way since his resurrection. He continues to be present in our community, just as he was present to the disciples. We find him in the breaking of bread, in our fellowship, in the way he guides our hearts as we try to walk in the way he taught. We find him, as today’s gospel suggests, when we “go back to Galilee,” when we continue to reflect on his teaching and on his life, when we reflect on our own lives, on those moments when we have known his presence with us and on the moments when we know we have abandoned him. We see him more and more clearly as we continue to study, to pray, to meditate, to live out that covenant as faithfully as we can.

Easter is about all of these resurrections. It is about Jesus, yes, but also about our own lives here and now. It tells us that death does not have the final word for our lives either, but also that we are already living a new life through faith. It is about seeing that faith passed down to a new generation of believers, the newly baptized who enter today into our family of faith and who give us all hope for the future of God’s kingdom. May we all hold fast to that faith, to our hope, and to the Easter joy it brings.



Sermon of the week: March 22, 2009
(Biblical readings; Numbers 21:4-9, Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22, 1Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21)

Lent 4
Mary Gavin

OK, let me just acknowledge right off that I know the reading we had from Numbers this morning was chosen because there is a reference to it in the gospel. And I know that there is a very specific interpretation given to it in the gospel, one that offers a particular way we might make sense of Jesus� crucifixion. At another time, I might choose to pursue that idea with you.

But this morning we are considering the final mark of mission: to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. So I want us to think about that reading from Numbers in light of the mark of mission, which means that just for now, I�m going to pretty much ignore the gospel passage.

When the Hebrew people first left Egypt, they were worried about what they�d eat in the desert. Exodus tells us that God provided for them with manna, a mysterious substance (at least to these folk who had been eating meat and vegetables in Egypt for several generations) that appeared on the ground every morning. When they first encountered it, it seemed strange, but they discovered that it was very edible, and they regarded it as a sign of God�s care for them that it appeared every day, just as they needed it.

But I can sympathize with them a bit as we hear them complaining about the food in today�s reading, which comes from a time near the end of their 40 year wandering. If I had been eating the same one thing, day in and day out, year after year, I�d be getting tired of it too. And it might occur to me to ask whether God, who created such diversity of life on this earth, might just possibly be able to send something else into my life for breakfast.

The problem with this attitude is that the complaining means the Hebrew people had lost sight of all the many ways God had been providing for them, day after day, year after year. Not just the manna, which probably was pretty boring by then, but also the watering places, and the spiritual formation they were getting by way of the commandments of God and the shaping of their worship, and the way they were able to defeat or get around any peoples who hindered their progress, and even that promise that they were headed toward a land of their own.

The Exodus journey was must have often been a hard trip, and it did go on seemingly forever. But the people also seemed to understand, each time that they lost faith and confidence in God, that they were falling away from the standard God was calling them to. So it�s not surprising that, when they find themselves camped among an abundance of snakes, they interpret this as God�s punishment for their complaining. However, it becomes for them another sign of God�s care when they are able to be healed of their snake bites through the symbolic magic of the bronze snake on a pole.

By now you�re probably wondering how in the world this might connect with the fifth mark of mission. To answer that, let�s think about the opposite of that mark. What is it that makes us disregard the integrity of creation and deplete the life of the earth? Basically, that happens when we are dissatisfied with what we have, with the bounty around us, and want something more, something different, something that we think will be less boring. We want to be comfortable, and we keep raising the standard of what constitutes comfort. Isn�t that in a nutshell what the Hebrew people were doing too?

There�s been a growing interest over the last few years in local food. More and more people are recognizing that it is better for the earth to grow our food in a sustainable fashion and not to mess up the atmosphere by shipping food all over the earth needlessly. The debate about developing the tar sands gets louder as more people come to realize the poisonous side effects of that development. We are asking more questions not only about how we use our other natural resources, but also about how we extract them. In part this is because modern mining practices are so disruptive of the earth that we cannot help seeing that there is something wrong with this as we look at the results.

I think we are even coming back to a view of the world that prevailed in biblical times, a view that says the world�s wealth and resources have limits. At least in our western culture, we had gotten away from that outlook for many centuries. We had instead come to believe that we could create more wealth, that there were no limits, that when one region or resource wore out, we�d invent something new. Now, and I think this may be very healthy, we are again coming to understand that the earth�s resources are finite, that we didn�t necessarily create new wealth all the while our general standard of living was rising, but instead we added to our own wealth at the expense of people living in other parts of the world�generally in other parts of an empire ruled by Europeans.

The stories in your handout today come from Uganda, one of the many places in the world where water is a scarce commodity, not to be taken for granted as we too often do here. But notice that this story is not only about water. The people are also being encouraged to grow a greater variety of crops, mostly�but not entirely�for their own consumption. We all understand that there is value in being self-sufficient in regard to food, in being able to have a nutritious diet without having to depend upon supplies brought in from a distance and often purchased at painfully high prices. Yet there is also value in having crops to sell, such as coffee in this story. Cash income allows people to make improvements to their homes and villages. It can provide money for school fees for their children. And, face it, not every kind of food can be grown in every part of the world. There�s no reason for us to be importing apple juice from China, but we can�t grow coffee in Canada.

The problem with cash crops arises when the large corporations that handle so many of the exports get greedy and force people to farm those crops on a larger scale at the expense of the environment and to the exclusion of crops they need to raise for their own food. We don�t have to travel to Africa to see how this system works: unfortunately, too much of our local farming operates the same way.

Or, to take another example that doesn�t have to do with food. We live in a beautiful valley, and we all admire the scenery, the wildlife, the lakes. It would be one thing to simply come and admire this beauty. Instead, what has happened is that people want to own a piece of it. So the entire lakeshore (almost) gets built up, with houses as close together as they can be jammed in. Instead of green hills, we are moving toward hills full of large homes. The marina project under discussion is evaluated almost entirely in terms of the economic benefits it might bring this community, with very little discussion about how it will impact the wetlands around the proposed site. We should be very thankful that large chunks of shoreline are part of the Standing Buffalo and Pasqua Reserves; at least there will be some undeveloped land left for the rest of us to admire.

I think we live at a time when we are beginning to notice the poisonous serpents among us. We are beginning to see the effects of our poor stewardship of the earth in global warming, water pollution, increased cancers caused by things we put into our environment. And I�m afraid some of us are hoping for a magical cure, hoping that we can just hang up the right images, criticize the worst offenders (but not ourselves), maybe come up with a new technological fix, and everything will be OK. But I don�t think that�s the lesson we should take from the story of Moses and the bronze serpent.

The people suffering snake bite didn�t only look at the bronze model for their cure. They also had a change of heart. They recognized that they had forgotten God�s constant care of them and had become ungrateful. I think we are called to a similar change of heart. We need to exchange our greed for gratitude. We need to recognize the many ways in which God cares for us, but also recognize the value of all God�s creation. We need to remember that stewardship is not about using as much as we can, but using as wisely as we can. Stewardship is about managing the earth�s resources for the benefit of the whole earth, all its people and all its species, not just our own selfish interests.

I know that for many of you, this mark of mission will be the one that is easiest to understand. It may even be the one to which you already devote the most energy. But too often we don�t connect our interest in the environment with our faith. Many of the organizations that are working hardest for the environment don�t make that connection either because they are trying to appeal not only to Christians but also to people of good will who may share a different religious background or none at all.

So thinking about this last mark of mission is an invitation to us to understand that whatever we do to respect creation is part of our spiritual practice. Appreciating the earth that God has given us and using its resources wisely is an act of faith. That attitude belongs to the spirituality of the desert, the journey on which God leads us through this life. We pass through our lives on earth as pilgrims, not as permanent residents. In a very real way, we are campers, not owners. If we approach life that way, we might find that our expectations change.

The marks of mission that we have considered over the last month are qualities that should characterize our life as a congregation as well as our lives as individuals. I hope we can find ways to continue the conversation, to think about all the activities and decisions of this congregation in light of these marks. And I invite you to use them as touchstones to think about the future of the church. If we took these marks seriously, what would this church look like 10 years from now? Do we want to develop some goals around them, so that these characteristics gradually become more obvious in our congregational life? Are there ways we can share that vision, and our commitment to it, with the larger church? That sharing is the second part of the Vision 2019 project. After Easter, let�s find ways to follow up on the reflection that we have done in these sermons and maybe come to a document or a presentation that would help us imagine an inspired but realistic vision of our church for the next decade.


Sermon of the week: March 15, 2009
(Biblical readings; Exodus 20:1-17 Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22)

Lent 3
Mary Gavin

Imagine that you live in an ordinary Jewish sheep herding family from Galilee at the time of Christ. You plan to go up to Jerusalem this year for the feast of Passover. You haven�t been able to go for the last few years; it�s a long distance to travel on foot, and it�s expensive. But this year, things look a little better for you, and you know it�s your religious duty to go if you can. When you get to Jerusalem, you�ll need a lamb for the Passover meal, and maybe you also want to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice for some special purpose. You can�t take the animals with you, since you�ll be walking for days to get to Jerusalem, and you hope to walk faster than the sheep. Besides, animals for sacrifice and for the Passover meal have to be without blemish. If your sheep got scratched or broke a leg along the way, you would not be able to use it. So before you leave, you sell a couple of your sheep to get money to buy sheep at the temple.

You start off from home with friends and neighbours who are also planning to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem this year. It�s safer to travel together, and more interesting besides. Along the road, you meet groups of people from other villages, and the news and gossip you exchange makes the trip seem faster. When you arrive at Jerusalem, the city is packed full of people. You find it so disorienting to be in such huge crowds that you have a hard time even finding the home of your distant cousins, whom you plan to stay with. Eventually you do find them, and you can finally relax a bit more safely and comfortably than you have since you left home.

On preparation day, the men of the family go to the temple to get a lamb for the Passover meal and to offer the personal sacrifices you have decided upon. The women stay home because at this time of year, the temple is so crowded that it would be too hard to get in. Women are only allowed into the outer courtyard anyway, whereas the men can go to the inner courtyard, where the actual sacrificing is done and where sometimes there are interesting religious discussions going on. The men in your family are looking forward to seeing how far the temple construction has progressed since the last time you came to Jerusalem, and to admiring the temple fittings, the sacred objects, and other signs of wealth that adorn or are stored around the sacred space that symbolizes God�s presence among your people. Of course, no one can go into that holiest place except the high priest, and he only goes in once a year. But all the beauty and mystery remind you of God�s power and glory and God�s favour to your people, for God has chosen this temple as a special holy place.

When the men arrive at the outer courtyard, it looks like the biggest public market you have ever seen. In addition to all the sheep and goats needed for Passover, there are cattle and doves on sale for other sacrifice. Since you cannot bring unclean, idolatrous Roman coinage into the temple, there are also currency exchange tables where you can trade the money you brought with you from home for temple coins. With those coins, you can pay your tithes and buy the necessary animals. People have come from all over Palestine and even from faraway foreign countries, so there is a mixture of languages, people shouting and arguing about how much the exchange rate should be and about how much you have to pay for the sheep. No matter how fair a deal you seem to get, you can�t help noticing that a Jerusalem sheep is quite a lot more expensive than a Galilee sheep. The money you brought with you would not go too far except that you will be sharing the Passover lamb with your cousins� family.

Even though the temple is supposed to be a place of worship, you can�t help feeling that worship is taking a second or third place. The market is so noisy and crowded; the sheep slaughtering area feels like an ordinary butcher�s operation except on a much larger scale. And while you have a certain religious pride in knowing that your temple is bigger and more glorious than the temples of other nations around you, you find yourself feeling more national pride than religious piety.

You might also wonder about all the money and all the labour that is going into this huge construction project. You know they�ve been working on it for over 40 years already, and clearly there is still a lot to do. You know this is your tax shekels at work, and you know that theoretically it�s for God�s honour, but you also see how well the priests and Levites are living compared to how you and your neighbours live back in the village. You see how important they make themselves out to be, when the reality is that they only have any power at all if the Romans let them. And then you feel a bit ashamed, but of course they will have even more power when the Messiah comes and the Romans are driven out. The whole system seems out of whack somehow, and in spite of the festival atmosphere, you return to the house where you are staying feeling a bit confused.

This is the kind of experience most pilgrims would have had that year when Jesus came up for Passover and threw the animal sellers and the money changers out of the temple. While many people might have realized that there was something not quite right about the way it all worked, most of them would have told themselves that it had always been like that, that�s just how things are. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer; what else is new? Most people would have tried to ignore what was under their nose and just say their prayers, offer their sacrifices. After all, we�re here to honour God, and we can�t let all that other stuff get in the way.

But that�s not how Jesus reacts. Jesus sees the same corrupt system, the same way in which temple operations keep people subordinated to a class of authorities who often cared more about their own interests than about their religious duties, authorities who worked more closely than they should with the Romans just so that they could hold on to the bits of power they actually had. Jesus knew what a sheep was worth and so how much profit the temple merchants were probably making because they had a captive market.

Jesus cuts through all the excuses that most people have always offered for an unjust or corrupt system. Maybe it has always been that way, but that�s not how it�s supposed to be in God�s kingdom. And if anyplace on earth should demonstrate the working of God�s kingdom, it ought to be the temple. Jesus is not content to simply fulfil his religious duties and go home. Driving out the money changers and the animal sellers and their herds is a protest against the injustice and irreverence of the system. It is a symbol that this kind of worship will have to end, since the whole worship system depends upon the temple marketplace. Jesus is offering a very public challenge to the authorities partly on behalf of God�s own honour, but also on behalf of the thousands of poor people who are being taken advantage of through this market and through the way religious laws in general were enforced.

Today we are considering the fourth mark of mission: to seek to transform unjust structures of society. This corresponds directly to the promise we make in our baptismal covenant to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. And I�m afraid it�s a promise, a mark of mission, that we all too often ignore. We might recognize what�s wrong in the systems of our modern world, we might be able to identify how they are unjust, but we all too often tend to brush that recognition aside by saying that �it�s always been that way,� or �that�s just how things work.� In fact, I�ve even been told by people on occasion that they don�t like to support PWRDF because some of its actions are �too political.� Many of us seem to believe that religion and politics don�t, or shouldn�t, mix.

In today�s gospel, we don�t just hear Jesus telling us a different way, describing the way God�s kingdom should ideally work. We actually see Jesus taking action�political action�in protest. If we truly believe what Jesus said about the kingdom of God, then we need to do the same. We have to be involved in changing the unjust systems around us, whether they are political, religious, economic, or social. Merely praying that the world will get better is not an option. Putting up with injustice and waiting for our heavenly reward is not living by the gospel.

Our national church suggests two areas for us to think about specifically. One is to do what we can to encourage our government to live up to the UN Millennial Goals. These goals are all about creating a more just world through better education and health care in particular. They set standards that we in Canada often take for granted, but that are far from accepted in other parts of the world. And, in fact, sometimes our comfortable standard of living directly creates the patterns that bring about poverty and the problems it brings in less economically developed nations.

The other area we might consider is the legacy of residential schools right in our own country. It�s true that these schools have been closed for some time now. It�s also true that our church has admitted responsibility for the abuses and loss of culture that took place there. We can say that it�s all in the past. We can say that it was really the government�s responsibility. We can say that we have apologized already. All of that is true to some extent. But the fact remains that the effects of generations of under-education, separation from normal family life, and being denied cultural roots are still felt today. At a minimum, we owe the residential school survivors respect, the honest chance to tell their stories and be heard. If we deny their experience, if we try to write off what happened to them, if we think that simply throwing money at their problems is all that is required of us, then we are not recognizing the injustice that was done to them and we cannot work to change the effects of that system.

I think today we are invited first of all to inform ourselves: about the millennial goals; about the whole residential school story; about how patterns of injustice are being allowed to continue in our world; and about what we can do to create change. The best action we can take might be simply to listen, really openly listen, to another person�s story. Another action might involve letter writing. Another action might involve looking at our buying patterns and trying to avoid products that depend upon slave labour or other kinds of exploitation. Eventually we may find ways to become more directly involved in one or two issues that matter the most to us.

We should also note that unjust systems do not only exist on other continents. There are economic issues in Canada, in this province, that could be changed. There is plenty of poverty, homelessness, health issues, and inferior education around us. To find them, we need only to look beyond our own immediate self-interest and ask whether the way things work is fair to everyone, not just to the rich and powerful. We need to compare the policies of this kingdom with the values of God�s kingdom, and then try to make changes where the two don�t match.

The kingdom of God will not come to perfection in our lifetimes. But we can be doing our bit to bring this world we live in now more into line with the values we learn from the gospel, the values that Jesus gave his life for.