Sermon for January 29th 2006

There is a story about a business man who once was traveling across Poland in a train compartment. He along with the other men in his compartment, began playing a game of cards. They were well involved in the game when another man joined them in the compartment.
The business men invited the new comer to join in the game. Unknown to the business man, the newcomer was a rabbi, and had no desire to play a card game, so he politely declined. It is worth noting that the business men were dressed in the newest and the fanciest attire, while the rabbi was dressed in older, less stylish clothes that had seen better days.
As the trip continued, and the men became more and more deeply involved in their card game and became louder and more animated in their conversation and play. They found the quiet demeanor of the other man in the compartment annoying. They continued to invite him to join, and he continued to politely decline. Then finally, the ringleader of the group, a wealthy and powerful business man, wanting to impress his associates took the newcomer by the collar and bodily heaved him out of the compartment saying, “If you won’t join our game you aren’t welcomed here …”
The rabbi quietly picked himself up and spent the rest of the trip on the train standing in the passageway waiting until he arrived at his stop.
When the train arrived in the Rabbi’s hometown, also the destination of the business man, the shabbily dressed rabbi was surrounded by a large crowd of his admirers who had been patiently waiting for his return home.
Standing on the platform, the business man asked one of the admirers who this shabbily dressed man in the centre of the crowd was. “Don’t you recognize Rebbi Hayyim, the most famous and revered rabbi in the country??” came the incredulous reply. The business man immediately pushed through the crowd and begged the rabbi’s forgiveness.
“I can’t” replied the rabbi was he was hustled off my his admirers anxious to see him home.
That night the business man went to the rabbi’s home and said – “Rebbe, I can find no peace for what I did to you on the train … I am not a rich man, but I will give 300 rubles to any charity you wish if you will forgive me …”
The rabbi’s answer was brief – “no,” was all he said.
The business man then turned to the rabbi’s eldest son and tried to enlist his help. The son, not wanting to offend his father waited until one day they were talking of things spiritual, and turned the conversation to forgiveness. Then cautiously he asked his father about his lack of forgiveness towards the man on the train …
The Rabbi listened to his son then said, “I cannot forgive him. He never insulted me. He did not even know who I was. Had he even an inkling of an idea of who I was, he never would have acted the way he did. He wants forgiveness? Let him go and find a poor anonymous Jew sitting on a train reading a book, and ask him for forgiveness …

The business man didn’t know who the man was, and was only willing to apologize for his bad behaviour when he realized that the man sitting in the compartment quietly reading a book, wasn’t just some poor man – but was a revered and respected Rabbi.
The business man was fooled by appearances. He valued the trappings more then the person …
It has been observed that when you drive across Northern Ontario, and most forested regions in Canada from the road you see tall beautiful stands of trees – mile after mile of rolling forests covering the hills and valleys along side the road.
It looks like a healthy expansive forest, until you travel into it for a few metres, or rise above the highway a few metres – then we can see that most of those forests were only a ribbon of greenery hiding the fact that every thing else beyond has been cut down. There are computer programmes now that give precision measurements to the logging companies on what to cut down and what to leave to leave a façade of a vast healthy forest. You see the result of this forestry when you fly over British Columbia and see kilometer after kilometer of clear cuts across mountains and valleys …
But when we’re tooling down the highway – we really don’t want to know that the forests we see along side the road are a fake façade that lacks substance … it is only when we rise above the road that we see the reality – and in this, there is an unfortunate parallel in this around how we envision and experience God. We often hold to a façade of faith, one that lacks depth …
Former Moderator Walter Farquharson once said of the modern Church, that we “don’t believe it is real unless it can be bought and sold …” He went on to note that our reality as a society has become one measured in economics, and economics alone. When we only measure things by their worth we are not dissimilar to the business man on the Polish train. We see the surface and make our judgement accordingly. If things meet with our approval – fine, if they don’t we tend to render a harsh judgement. Where we are beginning to see this most clearly is in the conversations and the warnings around global warming. We hear the dire warnings – we can see the evidence in the glaciers and ice caps – yet, we have been reluctant or totally unwilling to take steps that may bring change, because it may involve losing some of our toys … the stuff of life.
This week my mind kept returning to the Hopi prophecy that says – “only when the last fish is caught, only when the last river is dried up, only when the last tree is cut will we realize that we can’t eat money …”

This world view of value the commodities of life – the stuff that can be bought and sold contrasts sharply with our readings today that speak, not of surface appearance, but of what lies deep within – the relationship between ourselves and the Holy. The place of the holy in the task of hearing the prophetic at work in our world and in our lives.
It may be appropriate that our Gospel reading speaks of demons and exorcisms, because in our modern era such things are the domain of horror movies and less enlightened times. Yet for tens of thousands of years the very notion that the world was filled with evil spirits just waiting to possess us and lead us astray was a foundational belief in EVERY world religion.
What changed for us, of the enlightened west, is the idea that we’ve left such childish ideas behind. We’ve left those ideas in the past when we didn’t know better. Now it is easier to explain away demon possession as something remedied by medications and so forth …
But what if demons are alive an well and they aren’t what we think. What if the demonic we need to exorcise from our midst is the complacency towards things spiritual? What if the greatest demon we have within us is the selfishness by which we live our lives and guide our society??
What if the demonic behaviour we need to address and rid ourselves of is the very behaviour we scoff at in the polish business man man handling the esteemed rabbi, and yet we fail to see in ourselves??
Do we dare even think that we might have been too co-opted by our society … Do we dare listen for and listen to the prophetic voices that warn us that we stand on the brink of a disaster???
Author Madeline L’engle writes of prophecy: “How shall we tell the false prophets from the true prophet? The true prophet seldom predicts the future. The true prophet warns us of our present hardness of heart, our prideful presuming to know God’s mind. And the final test of the true prophet is love, God came to us as Jesus because of love.
The Old Testament prophets were often reluctant. The false prophets took pride in their prophecy and told the people what they WANTED to hear and so were popular. Whereas the true prophet, warning the people of the consequences of their evil actions, were anything but popular – they risked their lives. The mark of a true prophet in any age is humility, self emptying so that there is room for God’s word …”
The prophetic voices today are those that call us to see in ourselves the behaviour like the business man on the train … we need to look beyond the shallow facades, beyond the surface appearance, beyond the false values of a culture that values commodities over people … and begin to value things OTHER then the hottest, latest and most desirable object … it begins by valuing the people around us …
There are no easy answers to solving the big picture problems in our world, but the first step is by hearing the prophetic warnings that call us to look beyond the surface, to look beyond the stuff that can be bought and sold, to look beyond the comfortable, and move to a place where we have the courage and the faith and the vision to see the holy in everything ... the Holy is present in everything !!
The prophetic voices say simply – “the earth and all things in it, are God’s” – our job is to act accordingly … and it begins by opening our eyes, our hearts and our souls to God’s presence all around us …
May it be so … Thanks be to God …