Rosedale United Church

“Making Up Teams” January 15, 2012

Rosedale United Church

(1 Samuel 3:1-10 , John 1:43-51) Doug Norris

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So it looks as though Stephen Harper is not, after all, going to join in the great hockey rematch this winter. Maybe you saw this in the papers earlier this week – the 40th anniversary rematch of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series – and the front page of the Globe showed Vladimir Putin, and Stephen Harper, with the suggestion that these two leaders would actually play on the respective teams.

Putin, (in Quebec, pronounced ‘Poutine’) who is a fitness buff, was in full hockey gear, leaning into a sharp turn to go after a puck, digging in at the boards – very impressive. Harper, on the other hand, was playing road hockey in his jeans and an oversize hockey jersey, chasing a tennis ball. Putin looked like a lean trim athlete – Harper looked a bit like Winnie the Pooh. Anyway, the PMO has kyboshed the idea.

With no disrespect intended for Mr Harper, I know who I would pick first. Let me come back to this.

There is something encouraging about watching Jesus in the time when he was a small startup, picking his team. In the weeks after Christmas the traditional readings direct us to those stories where Jesus forms his community. Almost as soon as he had his own epiphany about his mission, he understood that it would come about if embodied in a community, and he began to pick a team.

It’s always good to have some context for these scattered Biblical stories we get, so I’ll take a moment here to recap. Follow the bouncing ball :

Jesus was from Galilee – a rural area a couple days journey from the religious and elite capital, in Jerusalem. There is a tension, an antipathy between these two places. KInd of like that tension between Toronto and, well, anywhere else in Canada.

At some point as a young man, possibly after the loss of the family land, he joins a kind of ‘Occupy Jerusalem’ movement, led by his cousin John. The idea is to rattle the elites into a return to the values and practices that honour God and serve the poor. John had developed a very careful and diplomatic approach to the elites, when they came to where the protesters were camped by the Jordan. ‘You brood of snakes…!!’ he shouted at them. While he likely meant that in the nicest possible way, it went downhill from there, and he was soon arrested.

After his baptism by John, so elegantly described in Kristin’s sermon last week, and after the execution of John, Jesus declares his own mission. In his home synagogue he borrows the words of the prophet Isaiah “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and sight for the blind…”

So now he sets about that work, and his first order of business is to find his people. So he goes home to Galilee, and looks for Philip, which brings us to today’s reading. Jesus finds Philip, who was perhaps an old friend, or maybe he was also a part of the group that had camped with John. Philip went and found his friend Nathanael, who sneered at Jesus, and then swore to follow him. ‘Oh’ said Jesus, ‘the things you’re going to see, if you come with me…’

In an age of lone superstars who go their own way, soaring then crashing, we have learned, and are learning, about collaboration. Who will be on what team? Who is with us?

Part of me wants to dismiss this notion of teams, because it smacks of divisions. Us versus them. Good guys and bad guys. Maybe when the Russians come over both teams should just put all their sticks in a pile and somebody will randomly pick sticks – one here, one there, one here, one there… and there could be a mashup, a friendly game.

But there are sides. This is the thing. The most profound questions, and the deepest evils, demand that sides be taken. There is, occasionally but rarely, the privilege of sitting on the fence, of staying above the fray. For the most part, to live a deeply moral life we need to choose, often, between right and wrong. Between speaking and silence.

In the movie The Quiet American, set in Indochina in the 1960’s, a reporter becomes involved, takes part in some of the violence that is escalating. ‘There comes a moment when, to be human, you have to choose a side…’

Let me say a bit about the team here. In fact, let me choose a squad.

I want Wayne on the team here, because he connects a mastery of the skills of music to an insistent sense of longing for spiritual food. We need these both, and we need them connected, so that we will be fed…

I want Kristin on the team here – in between pausing to have babies – because she has a quiet determination, a conviction about building a sustainable human community, anchored to a love for the church, and this is what will see us through…

I want Karen on the team here because she has a restless theological imagination, often out ahead of all of us, and a keen intellect, so wherever we get taken it will be intelligent and provocative.

There are so many on the team here – let’s call it a great bench strength – who you might rarely or never see – Clare and Mike and Judy and Mary and John and Norm and Valerie and and none of us, perhaps, are ever entirely certain about why we’re doing this, why we’re on this team. If pressed, we might pause and scratch our heads a bit – (Clare – past 2 years – tell me again why I volunteered for this ??) but I think it is something like this, and this joins us to Philip and Nathanael, to Mary, to Martha, to Simon and Andrew, it joins us to Martin Luther King Jr and Hildegard, to Oscar Romero and all of the others : a conviction forms, in us – a conviction that there is an intersection between our deep longings and this Jesus and his ways.

There is a magnetic pull that is not about charisma or about gain – simply that in his company, and even now across the millennia – in his company we feel the tug of a magnetic north that we believe will bring life, if we can be oriented to it. And so we go to him, and we go with him. And we go to and with his people.

This past November in Haiti, among all of the experiences, which at times were overwhelming – the heat and fatigue, the beauty and the grief and the poverty – I realized afterwards that the pulsing beat underneath the whole week had been simply being among a group of 500 people all oriented toward one thing – with no need to talk much about it and certainly no debate, no motions and no committees, simply being in the midst of a people all bending our energy toward one simple thing that would bring life. This was food for the soul. I want more of this.

Years ago when in various ways I heard Jesus beckon as he does to Philip with his ‘Will you come and be with me?’ and I said my Yes in various ways, I realize that this is what my fundamental ‘Yes’ was responding to. To move, now, not only in the restless tides of daily life, but to find a place in the deeper current, a gulfstream of spirit anointing and pointing us toward good news for the poor and binding up the brokenhearted and bringing sight.

A closing story. In one of my classes at Emmanuel College, some 30 years ago now, a former moderator, George Tuttle, used a hockey story to describe a theology. He spoke of how when he was a boy they played hockey on the pond, and he played one day on the team with his older brother, who was a strong player and it was good to be with him. And on the walk home from the pond George was excited and pranced around, reliving some of the plays, saying how good it was that he had decided to play on his brother’s team. And his brother stopped and turned and said to George – Let’s be clear about this – You didn’t pick me – I chose you.

We get to cooperate, but the choosing is done already. The invitation is already and always hanging in the air. When we are, in the poetry of that psalm, ‘being knit together in our mother’s womb’, we are chosen already to be among the people who bring life to life, who bring light to light, who anoint the world with good news. May it be so. Amen