1 Corinthians 12: 4-14 - Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

The 2^nd chapter of Acts, read each year on Pentecost Sunday, tells us of the day when the Holy Spirit descended on a group of Galileans who had come to Jerusalem for the festival of Shavuot, a group who were Jews by birth and followers of Jesus by inclination.  The power of the moment is described as wind and flame, and they began to speak languages unknown to them, recognized by people who had come to Jerusalem. This weird, powerful, ecstatic event, the day of the first Christian Pentecost, is remembered as the day when the Church was born.  

This year, however, my preaching text for Pentecost Sunday is not the 2^nd chapter of Acts, but the reading from First Corinthians 12 which we read as today’s Call to Worship. 

If we envision that first Christian Pentecost, we picture all the believers simultaneously receiving an outpouring of the same Holy Spirit; but clearly, the gift didn't land the same for all of them, nor should we expect it would. For each one, then in Jerusalem and here, now, would have different spiritual and personal backgrounds, experiences, strengths and shortfalls, preferences, gifts, skills and aptitudes; and – just as Jesus did with the twelve disciples – at Pentecost, God happily worked with whatever those believers brought with them.  There is at one and the same time unity in the Spirit, and diversity in the believers.

This is one of the many beautiful aspects of how God has made us.  We are not all wired the same, especially in the way we respond to God.  In 1^st Corinthians 12 the Apostle Paul validates all of the spiritual gifts given by the Spirit and expressed by believers, and encourages us as Church to build up one another, honouring it all. Taken together, all these gifts and the way we express them make the body of Christ stronger: stronger in love, and stronger in service.

But by the time Paul was writing to the Corinthian Church, roughly twenty to thirty years after that day of Pentecost, it is clear that they had stopped honouring all of the gifts. Pridefulness had arisen, especially among those who had the ecstatic gifts of divining spirits, speaking in tongues or interpreting tongues, and Paul challenges that hierarchy by placing these most highly prized of all the gifts at the tail end of the list.  He doesn’t say that the gifts are illegitimate, but he wants to undercut their pridefulness in their gifts by asking: what does this gift do to build up the body of Christ, to build up the common good?  The gifts of the spirit, argues Paul, are to be tools of love that help the Church lift up those who are discouraged or demeaned or fearful or judged or impoverished, not prideful possessions.

In Paul’s list, we recognize some elements of Church life that are timeless:  knowledge, wisdom, faith, healing.  Less familiar to us are the gifts of prophecy, miracles, divination, tongues and interpretations.  In other lists, Paul adds additional qualities like generosity, hospitality and kindness, and roles like teaching and leading.  By presenting all these ways in which Spirit is expressed, Paul wants to encourage Church people as we respond in many different life-giving ways. Paul calls us back to the truth that there is one God, one Christ, one Spirit, but many gifted responses.

As these congregations in Osoyoos and Oliver move into separate callings, starting on July 1^st it will be particularly important to truly celebrate all the different ways we respond to God’s calling, rather than getting frustrated by people whose ways of responding to God may not align with our own.  As United Church folks and Anglican folks in Oliver learn how to be together at St. Edward’s, that will be extremely important, and it will also be important in Osoyoos, as you reach out to parts of the community you may not be all that familiar with, and supportively welcome and work alongside social service agencies you are just getting to know.  And with that, I turn my attention once more to Janet Gear’s “Theological Banquet”, which describes the various ways that Mainline Canadian Christians tend to respond to God’s gracious calling.   

Remember, none of the place settings is the “right” or the “best” – these are categories based on observation, to help us understand our own responses, and those expressed by others.

So, in a typical congregation there will be people in the yellow “evangelical” category, who have experienced God’s transformative love turn their lives upside down in the best possible way, and they are just bursting to tell people about that.  Those at the evangelical place setting may have had a “born-again” experience, or their new life may have come through sobriety and twelve-step support and a loving Church home.  “Evangel” means “good news” and for the evangelical group, it’s good news that just has to be shared.  

“Ecclesia” means “the assembly of the faithful”, and for the ecclesials the things we do together as Church comprise a huge part of their response to God’s calling.  That includes what we do on Sunday: worshiping together, sharing the sacraments, passing the peace, teaching Sunday School, connecting over coffee. Many mid-week study groups fit here as well, and so do the commitments made by committee and Council members.

The purple, Missional category, is the category of practical Christian service.  Offering hospitality, raising funds for good causes, working in the Thrift Shop or serving community meals, are all part of this familiar category.  Missionals desire to put their faith into tangible, hands-on assistance.  This place-setting is practical, pragmatic, motivated by need. The phrase “we are the hands and feet of Christ” fits this group.

Next is the blue category, the category of Social Justice.  While Janet calls it “ecumenical”, based on the Greek word “Oikumene” which alludes to the issues of the entire world, in my experience ecumenical always means inter-church, which sometimes works for social justice but often struggles to do so.  In any case, the social justice folks at this place setting are moved by the withholding of civil rights, and social inequity, and global suffering, and seek to respond in faith through social justice actions such as advocacy, resistance, solidarity, education and communication.   

And there is the green, “spiritual” place at the table.  This is the place of contemplation and prayer, and this may be a place where we meet people from other religious traditions, or young people seeking meaning without dogma, or people who are moved by the rhythms of the natural world.  The Spiritual place at the table includes contemplative traditions that meets God’s energy in art and beauty, in poetry and song, in prayer, in nature, and in silence. The green place setting is a place of awe and wonder and peace.

My hope is that these five place settings at the banquet will pique your curiosity.  The world is full of injustice, and our social justice folks can reach into that. The world is full of need, and our missional folks are equipped to respond.  The world is filled with emptiness and bad news, and the sharing of the Evangel of Jesus Christ is a wonderful response to that.  And to be equipped, the Church needs those who meet God in the silence of the spirituals, and in the gatherings of the ecclesial faithful.

When the Holy Spirit came to the Church, God knew full well that the gift was being given to a whole range of people who would be inspired in many different ways, and while that can at times be chaotic it can also be indescribably beautiful.  Whether you’re hearing the words of Paul talking about spiritual gifts, or the image he goes on to use about the different parts of the body working together, or Janet Gear’s image of the theological banquet, on this day of Pentecost we celebrate our unity in God’s love and the rich diversity of responses.

This Pentecost, then, we consider the goodness of the gift, and the glorious diversity of human response, and as we prepare to receive bread and cup at the table of Jesus, we pray that the banqueting table of this congregation will be rich and varied and filled with new ways of being, in the years God still has in front of you. Amen.

For further reading:

Gear, Janet. https://www.leadershiftpm.ca/the-theological-banquet

Gear, Janet. Undivided Love. © 2022. https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000231789479/Janet-Gear-Undivided-Love

“Spiritual Gifts” - https://www.gotquestions.org/spiritual-gifts-list.html

© 2026 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge

 

Acts 17: 22-31

Imagine with me, being in Athens, 2000 years ago.

For those who have actually visited Athens, that’s probably not a hard thing to do, while for those like me who know Athens only from grade 6 social studies, it takes a bit more imagination.

The Apostle Paul had the task of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and now he has arrived in Athens, the centre of Greek culture.  As a Jew, Paul had grown up with a strict prohibition against idols of any sort, yet here he was in Athens, a city which honoured forty or more deities.  At first, it was “distressing” (Acts 17:16) for Paul to be surrounded by idols as idolatry stood directly in the face of the second commandment, which prohibited bowing down to graven images or even making them.  Yet at another level he couldn’t help but be impressed at how “religious” this place was. Even if the Greek beliefs were very different from his own, it was hard to go to Athens and just be offended.  

In the midst of idols to Athena and Zeus and Poseidon was an idol with the inscription, either “to an unknown God” or “to the unknown God.”  The Oxford Dictionary of the Bible puts it this way: “Although such an altar has not been found [in Athens] by archaeologists, inscriptions are known of altars [elsewhere] dedicated 'to unknown gods'. The reasoning was that one or other of the gods might show anger at having been overlooked. Such an inscription was designed to cover all contingencies”.

The oddness of this is striking: amidst all the specifically named idols, an idol to an UNKNOWN GOD, sort of a safety-net idol to appease any deities that may have gotten overlooked.  And so, in our imaginary tour of ancient Athens, we pause at this unusual monument and ask what Paul’s experience in Athens has to say to us in our time and place.

At first, I admit that I’m a bit amused by an idol with a question mark on it – but there is something both familiar and disheartening about a monument to an unknown deity.  For the fact of the matter is that in the year 2026, many communities in the northern hemisphere could truthfully have a billboard, plaque or building with this same inscription on it: “dedicated to an unknown God”.  The news keeps us apprised of the actions of religious extremists of all sorts, including Christian, who focus hatred in the name of the God of their understanding on those who are least able to defend themselves; but outside of that, to huge swaths of our population, God is completely unknown.  And in many corners of social media, anyone who speaks of God is mocked and eagerly dismissed, this notion of God a childish folly practiced by the deluded.  Recent figures indicate that some 35% of Canadians identify themselves as having “no religion,” and that number goes above 65% in places like Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Some of this is entirely of our own making.  Wars of religious origin push the entire world to think twice about the whole concept of God and religion. Hatred against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, active limitation of a woman’s agency over her own body, the banning of books that encourage an open mind, are all actions inexplicably undertaken by religious folk in the name of God and happily publicized as if this what a true Christian should think.  Actions of cultural genocide, including the Residential Schools, generate shame that we will need to deal with for a very long time.  The Church, I’m afraid, has made it easy for God to be unknown in this time and place.

But it’s not that simple. In the forty-five years since I preached my first sermon, I have seen a steady increase in western Canada of people whose ancestors had identified as Christian for centuries, who now have no knowledge of the faith and no Christian memory, because neither they, nor their parents nor their grandparents had a Church connection.  My brother’s family falls into that category: he was a preacher’s kid in the 1950s and absolutely hated the judgmental expectations, so his kids were raised with no knowledge of Christianity except that the Church was narrow-minded and limiting, and then when they had kids, the whole “religion” thing didn’t even warrant a mention.   That’s a really common phenomenon in Canada and it has been happening since 1965, when Church involvement started its steady downward slide. Add to that other factors –Sunday shopping and sports, growing secularization, the un-cool factor attached to mainline Christianity, as well as the hateful things said by some Christian leaders, a statue with the inscription “to the unknown God” fits the bill.

But there is good news to be found as we seek present day connections. Paul used the idol “to an unknown God” as a door-opener, acknowledging how important religion was to the Athenians, then speaking of the God who was anything but unknown to him: God the creator, God the source of wisdom and dignity, God made known in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Some of his points were accepted, others were ridiculed, but it’s the way he presented it that impresses me.  Paul met the people where they were; he presented his beliefs clearly and rationally, without demonizing their beliefs. Rather than the “I’m right, you’re wrong” attitude that has marred so many religious interactions, Paul found a way into religious dialogue by respecting what was there as a starting point.

This approach is so important, right now, for mainline Christian Churches that hope to have a future: meeting people where they are, whether they are folks who used to be Church-involved but are now burnt out or wounded by the experience; folks who have no Christian memory; or folks of completely different cultural or religious backgrounds, who have religious leanings of a totally different shape. 

A case in point: thirty years ago, I served a New Church Development congregation in north Calgary, who had recently constructed a functional little Church building.  The main room in the Church, our Sunday morning sanctuary, was a bland multi-purpose room with no Christian symbols displayed. That was done on purpose, as there was a school of thought in the early ‘90s that putting up a cross or anything like that would turn people off.  In particular, there was a large Asian population in the area, many of whom were Muslim or Buddhist, and nobody wanted to cause offence when that space was used for voting, or community meetings, or rummage sales.  

But there was a space up high in the room just begging to have a cross put in it, and eventually I asked a woodworker in our Church family to hand-craft and install one.  And within ten days of installing the cross (ten days!) we got a phone call from a local Muslim group, asking if they might perhaps be able to do their Ramadan observances in our Church building.  To this day, I believe that it was our willingness to claim our faith that signalled to neighbours of different beliefs, that religion is something that mattered to us, as it mattered to them. When we installed the cross our sanctuary changed from being a room dedicated “to an unknown God”, to saying, like St. Paul did, “you and I know about God in different ways, let’s talk about it.”

Now, if I wanted to I could keep circling this block, finding one example after another of how the society we live in does not know God, of know God in vastly different ways.  But the inscription, “to an unknown God” is challenging in a good and very personal way, bordering on inspirational, because it pushes me to say, “well, how do I know God?  What does it mean to say I know God, given that God is by definition beyond my ability to really know or understand?

For me, much of the answer, is that we have a history with God, we know what it is to feel existential love, we have experienced freeing grace, we know how it feels to do something just and loving in Jesus’ name.  We cannot claim complete clarity and knowledge when it comes to God, nobody can, but we can identify those holy moments and blessed relationships where God is made known.

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians (1:15), he wrote that Jesus Christ is ‘the image of the invisible God.’  If we think back to the nativity stories, Jesus is known as “Emmanuel, God-with-us”, his birth a pivotal moment when God says to us, “I’m not going to leave you stranded and isolated, wondering how you could possibly know me; I’m going to live your life, experience the emotions you experience, and show you what it means to love one another even when you are despised or betrayed”.  As the one bearing the image of God, Jesus discloses what God is like; he is, for Christians, the decisive revelation of what God is like.  This need not imply that Jesus is the only manifestation of God, but for Christians, it does mean that in Christ Jesus, the person of God who lived, and died, and lives again, God ceases to be “unknown” or “unknowable.”

In the good news of Jesus Christ – his preaching, his embodied commitment to healing, his repeated demonstrations of love without measure – we experience that God is love.  And I, personally, have found that when I acknowledge that I am embraced by love, and attempt to live my life like Jesus, expecting to encounter God through love, then I will encounter God.  And that opens us to see God all around us:

We encounter God in the amazing presence of an infant, who has absolutely no barriers between herself and those who love her.  In the wide-eyed expectancy between a little one and her mother, we are reminded of what it means to completely trust in the loving gaze of our God.

We encounter God when people roll up their sleeves for a cause, whether the cause is homelessness, or hunger, or safe haven for refugees, or true welcome of the queer community.  (A shout-out here to my spouse who is a particularly fierce “Mama Bear”, as many moms of trans kids are).  We encounter God when people change their behaviour to be more loving.  We encounter God when people intentionally choose a path that serves others, rather than being motivated by their own greed. 

We encounter God in the living, breathing organism we call Mother earth.  In the rhythms of growth and decay, in the rain, in the enlivening power of a hot summer day or freshening breeze, in the interplay between waterway and soil and plant and creature, we feel God’s creative love in action.  As we anticipate another year in the orchards and the vineyards, God is known.

We encounter God in moments of prayer when we become completely quiet, shutting off the constant stream of thoughts and distractions in favour of her gift of silence.  And we can even encounter God in the holiness of death.  When this life reaches its end, and thankfulness is expressed, and gratitude is shared, and reconciliation can be found, God is there.

To quote the Apostle Paul once more, “in God we live and move and have our being.”  The God in whom we live our lives holds us in creativity and love, wisdom and justice and kindness all at once, and that guides us as we engage others in their sacred journeys.  It is a blessing to be on these paths, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, sometimes criss-crossing, as we together with one another and together with all living beings embrace God’s amazing gift of life.  While I can understand the sentiment of “an unknown God” I am so thankful for the ways that God bridges that gap, to be known to us, and fill our lives with love. Thanks be to God. Amen.

References cited:

Oxford Dictionary of the Bible: available as an app on Google Play!. 

Smit, Jana Louise. https://historycooperative.org/greek-gods-and-goddesses/

Theoi Project. https://www.theoi.com/

Turcan, Robert. https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/agnostos-theos#:~:text=The%20phrase%20agn%C5%8Dst,were%20unknown%20but%20who%20just

Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligion

© 2026 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

John 21: 12-17 and Psalm 23 - Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

Just before I start, I need to set the stage.  Today’s sermon is not set in a general “somewhere”; this one is situated in a particular place.  So imagine with me the risen Christ, and some of his disciples, sharing breakfast on the rocky beach near Tabgha, in Galilee.  In this place, Jesus had walked and talked with the disciples and now the risen Christ and Simon Peter have some one-on-one time, talking about Peter’s role in the future. 

a sermon preached at Osoyoos United Church, April 26, 2026

It is so hard to come back, when you have really messed something up.  Not just made a blooper-reel mistake, but made a choice that impacted someone else’s life… or said things that have fractured a relationship… or completely missed something that you really should have responded to, conveying a lack of friendship or caring to someone else.

In today’s gospel reading, Peter is in such a position relative to Jesus.  Peter, who had been so bold throughout their time together, had suddenly turned timid in the final week of Jesus’ life.  Although I can’t for the life of me imagine what difference it would have made to Jesus’ fate, all four gospels want us to know that three times Peter had the opportunity to proclaim that he was a follower of Jesus; and three times he lied, disowned Jesus, denied any knowledge of the man.

Knowing this failure of nerve, let us hear once more the exchange at the beach of Tabgha between the Risen Christ, and Peter:

¹⁵ When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶ A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷ He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 

Is there perhaps a connection, between Peter denying Jesus three times, and Christ repeating this question three times? Bible commentators over the aeons answer a hearty “yes”: three denials need to be countered by three affirmations.  Christ forgives Peter, Christ has something big for him to do, yet there is a sense that the wounded relationship between them has not completely healed.  Reconciliation is not easy.  Recovering from faithless words or actions is not easy.  Forgive and forget is a lovely saying, but does not often describe the human condition.

In a blog post, Pastor Steve Oliver points out a simple but noteworthy thing in this scripture:  in their early days together it was Jesus who gave the disciple Simon a new name:  Peter, which means, “the rock.”  Simon Peter was his foundational guy, the rock (Matthew 16:18) upon which the Church would be built.  But in this beautiful post-resurrection scene of Christ and his friends sharing breakfast on the beach, Christ does not address him as Peter-the-Rock; he rolls it back, and calls him Simon, Simon-the-fisherman.  Maybe it’s just me, but if I were Peter I think that hearing Christ abandon that new name, a name expressing confidence in him, and going back to his old name, his “deadname”, might well have stung more than being asked the same question three times.

There is in this encounter, another word swap.  The first two times Jesus asks Peter, “do you love me?” he uses the Aramaic equivalent of the word AGAPE to describe the kind of love he is talking about, and Peter answers with a different word for love, the Aramaic equivalent of PHILEO.  As described by Huffington Post contributor Gary Edmonds, agape, the love word Jesus spoke, “is not based on merit of the person loved, but [is] unconditional,…kind and generous. It continues to give even when the other is unkind, unresponsive and unworthy. It only desires good things for the other and is compassionate”.  Agape is the selfless love of service, a full-on sacrificial love offered for the benefit of another. The word that Peter uses in reply, however – Philéo – is what we might call brotherly love, or friendship.  There’s nothing wrong with phileo, we all need friends, but what Peter is offering is way below what Christ was asking him for.

So after two times of asking if Peter will be self-giving and Peter saying he’ll be fraternal, the third time, Christ relents and uses the same word Peter had been using. It’s as if he realizes that he’s not going to get agape out of Peter, so phileo will do.  J.B. Phillips, in his New Testament translation, follows this line of logic, with Jesus twice asking, “do you love me” and Peter answering “yes, I am your friend”; the third time Jesus asks, “are you my friend” and, according to Phillips, Peter is hurt, not because he’s been asked the same question three times, but because Jesus let go of his hope that Peter might be capable of that higher Christian love, agape.

We see here, that even in this foundational relationship, which was such a force during the earthly ministry of Jesus, things can go sour. Sour, but not beyond recovery.  Jesus did what Jesus always does – then, and now: he provides a path forward.  No, things weren’t like they used to be. Christ didn’t call him Rocky anymore, and when asked to love without reserve, Simon Peter could only muster friendship – but that didn’t end his friendship with Jesus,.  And while Peter’s response to Christ may have been underwhelming in the moment, he did become that rock on which the Church was built. This, to me, is what the reconciling love of Jesus looks like: it owns the truth of what has gone before, and in light of that truth, finds a path. Sometimes there is no safe path forward, especially when there has been abuse, but there are so many other times when factors like embarrassment and anger and resentment and ego and fatigue block the gracious actions of the Holy Spirit, and if we can get past those things, we needn’t remain stuck in the same place forever.   

This ability to find a pivotal future for Simon Peter, is traditionally known as “the restoration of Peter.” [this stone Church in Galilee is named for it]. Here, Christ establishes with him a fresh start, the kind of fresh start that many of us have relied on repeatedly in our family relationships, the kind of repentance-based hope we turn to as the Church as we do the work of reconciliation with First Nations peoples.   Three times Peter denied, three times he failed to grab hold of the invitation by Jesus to love with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, yet Jesus would not take no for an answer.

Consistently, repeatedly, in their time spent together at Galilee, Jesus focused the attention of the disciples on those in their midst who were most vulnerable: those who were held captive by harmful social conventions, by lifelong infirmity, or by unjust financial structures, and Jesus implored his followers to be people of God’s liberating love.  Often, Jesus had to repeat himself as the disciples – especially as portrayed in Mark’s gospel – are not the brightest bulbs in the package, but these were the people he had chosen to bring healing and wholeness to those in need.

In this, Jesus aligns himself and his disciples with the long-standing religious tradition of portraying spiritual leaders – and, at times, God – as shepherds who would keep the vulnerable little lambs out of harm’s way.   He’s naming a reality in his world and ours, that the forces of inequality intentionally create very precarious conditions in some people’s lives, people whose lives are already shaky. Like sheep who need a shepherd to make sure they don’t tumble down a cliff, or to protect them from wolves, Jesus recognizes that there are particularly vulnerable ones in this world who need to be noticed and loved and attended to.  While the 21^st chapter of John was talking only about people, in the industrialized world we live in, I think Christ would include the soil, the water, the atmosphere, endangered plants and creatures, in the list of those at peril because of human greed.   And in relationship to these vulnerable ones, Christ says to Simon Peter, “Feed my lambs, Shepherd my sheep, feed my sheep.”  Love the vulnerable ones.   Guard them, help them find safety, establish justice, don’t completely ruin this planet, remember that every person and, in fact, every living being is beloved in the eyes of the Creator.  

When we think back to the social status of a shepherd in the days of Jesus, we may remember just how low a position it was.  Some ancient sources suggest that the testimony of a shepherd was not allowable in court, so low was the common opinion of them, and even more than that: in the economy of the day, the value of a sheep was probably higher than the value of a shepherd.  So when Christ commands Simon Peter to be a shepherd to the sheep, this is not a high-status proposition; it was a call to service.  Just as God, the good shepherd, was said to be present even in the valley of the shadow of death, even when we are surrounded by enemies, so Peter and those following after him in Christ’s name were to put themselves on the line.  And no, not just pastors or priests or ministers, though Peter is regarded as the first Pope; this is what Christ expects of all who claim to be disciples, all communities of faith bearing his name, all who have heard in the brave, reconciling words of Jesus the distinctive ring of truth.   Christ has a special affinity for all who are imperiled, and those of us who bear his light in the world are called to deep, non-judgmental service: practical, personal, and yes, even political. 

As we gather this morning, as disciples of Christ Jesus, we imagine the relationship between Jesus Christ and Simon Peter, and its rhythm from reliability, to doubt, to reconciliation and new possibility; and as we do so, we go deep in our own experience: our places of brokenness, our gratitude for healing, the places where we have work to do.  We see in this primary relationship between Jesus and his right-hand man, Peter, that even when we miss the mark there is the opportunity to be restored.  At this time when we seek new horizons in the name of Jesus, may all this be so, in the unfolding of your lives, and our life together.  Amen.  

References cited:

Edmonds, Gary. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/agape-and-phileo-love-we-need-both_b_58a1e5d6e4b0cd37efcfeb23

Jarrett, Ed. https://www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/what-did-jesus-mean-when-he-said-take-care-of-my-sheep.html

Oliver, Steve. https://holyjoys.org/restoring-the-fallen-peters-restoration-john-211-19/

Phillips, JB. The New Testament in Modern English. © 1958.

 © 2026, Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

Acts 2: 42-47 - Sunday, April 19, 2026

a combined Territorial Acknowledgement, Candle Lighting, and Reflection, from a worship service at Oliver United Church on Sunday, April 19th, 2026, prior to a congregational meeting. 

Symbols and symbolic actions mean a lot in Church life.

In his seminal book, Dynamics of Faith, Theologian Paul Tillich wrote that a symbol “participates in that to which it points.”   A symbol goes beyond mere metaphor; when something has symbolic power, it reaches beyond this material realm and touches the Holy.

Each Sunday morning, three candles are lit at the beginning of worship.  This was a practice that was already well-established by the time Shannon and I got here in the fall of 2024. As we prepare for a congregational meeting in which we imagine what it will be like to leave this sanctuary and attach ourselves to another house of Worship, let’s reflect on the symbolic power of each Candle.

+++ 

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action, following years of first-hand testimony.  Then in May of 2021, news broke about the ground-penetrating radar at the grounds of the former Indian Residential School in Tk'emlúps.   In both these events, the brokenness between First Nations people and those who have come since was revealed in the starkest of terms.  Canadians in general and Churches in particular were called to account.

Lighting this red candle is a symbolic act by which we reach into God’s holy intention for reconciliation, inviting God’s healing power to light the path to a new future.  Our intentions do not erase the harm, but they do believe the testimony, and that is a start.  Lighting this red candle, week after week, symbolizes a desire for forgiveness and relationship with First Nations, and it challenges us to do more to embrace all populations harmed by the actions or the silence of the Church. When we light the red candle, we say no to any oppressive actions sinfully undertaken in Christ’s name: we seek forgiveness and a right path forward, lit by God’s own desire for reconciling grace.

And, as we prepare to move from one building in the town of Oliver to another building in the town of Oliver, the red candle and our territorial acknowledgement also remind us that in both places, we gather on the traditional unceded land of the peoples of the Syilx Okanagan Alliance.

 +++

A second candle is lit, which I have been calling a candle of connection.  This is a lovely symbol of Christian connection with our siblings in faith at Osoyoos United Church.  With time, though, it became evident that this community of faith had its own warm, genuine local connection, as many friends from St. Edward the Confessor Anglican Church frequently come to worship with us here.  Symbols need not remain static, so time the symbolic meaning of this candle broadened and deepened as it acknowledged not only our sister congregation in Osoyoos, but our growing connection with the St. Edward’s community of faith.   Christ’s calling from the 17^th chapter of John, “that all may be one,” has come to take on even fuller symbolism..

On June 30^th of this year, just a few weeks from now, the Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge comes to an end, freeing each of these two congregations to more fully immerse itself in God’s new and specific calling for each place.  We part as friends, and I expect the congregations will continue to do some practical things together, and Oliver United may find new connections with other nearby United Church congregations – in OK Falls, Oasis United in Penticton, Naramata Community Church, Summerland and Cawston, to name a few.

These broader connections symbolized by this camera take us right back to the origins of the Church.  In those days, people came from all walks of life, some drawn by the generous sharing of financial and material resources, some drawn by ecstatic expressions of holiness and prayer.  That breadth of belief and practice would have been exciting at times and frustrating at times. The reading that led off today’s service, in the 2^nd chapter of Acts, speaks of the togetherness that reached beyond differences, and the willingness to pool resources for the greater common good.   What a concept that was… and wouldn’t it be an amazing witness to the world if the Church could show such loving unity once more.

As we seek to share space at St. Edward’s, a home that is still very new to us – but home to our Anglican friends for 75 years now - I pray that this candle of connection will continue to warm us and provide a healthy glow for us to live by.

 +++

The third candle, the Christ Candle, symbolizes the divine light that illumines what we do here and how we live out the days between Sundays.  The light of Christ burns in the heart of all who trust in him and travels with them.  We also recognize that the light of the Divine is something born into all God’s children; this is a light we recognize in others and are drawn to.  The Christ light reminds us, symbolically, of the way that God’s holy intention lives within us and between us, before us and behind us, and it so clearly reminds us that while my best efforts in life are a great thing, I don’t generate my own light; God does that. 

While building safety rules insist that we don’t just leave the Christ Candle to burn in the sanctuary between Sundays, in my practice of worship over the years, there is only one time that the Christ Candle actually gets blown out during a worship service: on Good Friday, in that moment when Jesus himself gave up his Spirit, the moment when evil seemed to have won.   On the third day, though, on Easter Sunday, the flame comes alive once more, symbolic of the way that even when everything within us says that we have been defeated, God says NO, that is not true.   This light is here, to help you see with hopeful clarity even amidst the gloomiest shadows.  The light of Christ is the light of life, the light of love.

And so we re-light this candle, to guide each of us and all of us together, and to remind us always that our ministry in the world is Christ’s ministry.  All our hopes, all our plans, are intimately tied to the Christ who lights our way.

 +++

Taken together, people of Oliver United Church, these candles say so much about who you are, where you have been, and where you are going  Each brings a unique symbolism, and you will need all of them as the path leads from here… a desire for reconciliation, a commitment to connection, a trust in Christ’s guiding light.  These, together, will light the journey to your new home at St. Edward’s.  Thanks be to God for the gift of light, Amen.

Reference cited:

Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. NYC: Harper, 1957.

© 2026 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge. 

Matthew 28: 1-10 - Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026

Today we celebrate the dawning of a new day.

Forty-two years ago, when Shannon and I headed off to seminary at VST, we made a move from our sunny prairie home to Vancouver, where sunshine is a much rarer commodity, especially in the winter. When we moved back to BC in the fall of 2024, the possibility of bleak winters was well known to us, though this winter of 2025-2026 was quite the oddball. 

Growing up in a generally sunny place, I had no idea how important the sun was to me because it was always there, and then I lived in a place where it was a less frequent companion and realized how much my personal energy gets recharged by solar power.  I was raised where it would get to 40 below in the winter but at least it was sunny –“and it’s a dry cold, don’t ‘cha know” – but when we got to Vancouver we started carrying umbrellas everywhere we went, and shivered all the time, in the relatively balmy winter temperatures of minus-five to plus-five.

Then: springtime came. In 1985, I learned that springtime in British Columbia is the most startlingly beautiful season I have ever lived in, anywhere. The sun returned and the people rejoiced!  And when we looked around us, there were cherry and apple blossoms, magnolias and rhododendrons and dogwood, crocuses and daffodils and hyacinths, and here in the south Okanagan, the list includes the blossoming out of apricot and peach and nectarine and plum and pear, as well as cherry and apple.  As a flatlander still trying to find his place in 1985 and, to an extent, even now, not only was this a feast to my eyes, it restored my soul.  The funeral pall of drizzling gloom that had suppressed and spirit throughout the long dreary days of winter was lifted, and replaced by brightness and beauty and optimism, a divine-infused hope of better days to come. 

The emotions that I just described are very much akin to the emotions of Easter Sunday: the dawning of a new day after the indescribable gloom of crucifixion, the dormancy of winter replaced by the headstrong, colourful insistence of spring, and God’s own promise of even better days to come.   The clouds part, the sun shines, the stone is rolled away, and life has unimaginable hope once more.

People around the world – particularly in northern climes, where the cycles of seedtime and harvest may be brief and precarious – celebrate the coming of spring with a variety of religious and cultural festivals, many of which have themes of lessening darkness and growing light, or the death of a seed in the earth followed by the resurrection of new growth and harvest.  The Venerable Bede, writing in the 8^th century, noted that the resurrection festival, Easter, draws its name from the Saxon goddess of the dawn, Eoster. That connection sits fine with me, for it makes perfect sense that the cycles of nature established by Creator God, which we count on year-round, would so dramatically align with another holy cycle, the dying and rising of the Christ, which we count on as we consider the new life proclaimed by Jesus for a world more just, and the eternal hope he sets in our souls.

As finite humans striving to make sense of an infinite God, we yearn to make sense of things far beyond our understanding.  The trustworthy return of seasons, the predictability of germination and growth, our lifelong wondering about what happens when we die, hard questions about love and hatred and the lives of the just and the unjust, have been questions for millennia.  We seek the divine in ways that fit our setting, and God meets us in those desires.  The varieties of culture and language and religions, taken together, form a profoundly exciting diversity, expressing a cross-cultural human desire to seek God, in ways that we will find God and will be found by God.

And so today, I notice what God’s creative energy is doing in creation, what God’s everlasting commitment to life has meant to people around the world, and what God’s restorative energy has done in Christ, and as these truths co-exist I am filled with awe and wonder.  

I will never truly understand the process of germination and growth, yet my very existence and the presence of every foodstuff that nourishes my body relies on that process.  Our son, who worked at farms and fisheries for years, helped me learn more about this but still I am happily baffled by the details and sequences of it all.  I am thankful for the innate inclination toward life, a divine urge which God has given to the earth and the seas and to all living beings. As mentioned at our candle-lighting, I am thankful for Indigenous peoples around the world who keep reminding us how life is infused into everything around us, and for our neighbours of many faiths who have such varied ways to express wonder and gratitude for the trustworthy agricultural cycles of life, death and rebirth. In all processes of growth, in the emergence of new life, I am awash in the glory of God.

I see those same processes at work in the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.  Throughout the season of Lent we had six small candles at the front of the Church, lighting one more each Sunday, signifying the way that Christ’s ministry was becoming bigger and deeper and more influential as he travelled through Galilee. That ministry of local impact grew into the words and traditions that still speak to us today.  We see in the story of Jesus, God’s own intention for our lives and for all life: a desire to open our eyes, open our hearts, open our homes and our tables, open our lives to an expansiveness of love that we can barely even imagine.

We also see in the story of Jesus, the sharp resistance of those who were threatened by him, and that is an unfortunate and inescapable reality even today.  As the light of Christ was growing, illuminating a wider swath, those who sought to deny life attempted to extinguish his light altogether.  In our world of 2026, words like compassion, inclusion, empathy and fairness, which I always assumed were positive attributes that everyone would strive for because they are so closely connected with the ministry of Jesus, are now dismissed and denounced, by powers and principalities who claim Jesus as Lord yet serve very different purposes than he served.  When threatened, empire responds with force, then…and now.

On this day when we celebrate the durability and strength of Easter love, we know that in our lives and in the life of the world, there are times when the clouds gather, when the sun is hidden, when death is all too real, and life itself seems like a cruel joke.   Much as I would like to say that the story of Jesus was a straight upward incline that just kept getting better and better, there was a moment when it all fell apart, when the brutality of crucifixion appeared to have the last word.  At Easter, meeting these challenges face-on, we proclaim our trust in the life-giving power of God, who will not let death have the final say.  The same God who bursts open seeds by the tender determination of shoots does not leave us in despair. The same God who tends to our woundedness helps us find the resilience to start again.  The same God who brings low-hanging winter clouds to our valley for weeks at a time, rewards our perseverance with blossoms and beauty.

When he was a young parent, Christian singer/songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman suffered a sudden and unimaginably tragic death in his family.  His song, Spring is Coming, attempts to embrace God’s healing love in the midst of sorrow, and it goes like so:

We planted the seed while the tears of our grief soaked the ground

The sky lost its sun and the world lost its green to lifeless brown

Now the chill in the wind has turned the Earth hard as stone

And silent the seed lies beneath ice and snow

 

And my heart's heavy now but I'm not letting go

Of this hope I have that tells me Spring is coming, Spring is coming….

 

Hear the birds start to sing Feel the life in the breeze

Watch the ice melt away The kids are coming out to play

Feel the sun on your skin Growing strong and warm again

Watch the ground: there's something moving

Something is breaking through New life is breaking through

 

Spring is coming…
all we've been hoping and longing for soon will appear

Spring is coming…it won't be long now, it's just about here.

 Those words, written amidst tears, pretty much say it all for those of us who are enlivened by Easter faith.  On this day of resurrection may you, my friends in Christ, find hope of new life.  As we hear the words of the gospel of Matthew speak of an empty tomb and a risen Lord, may we, as inheritors of that tradition, be startled into seeing God in new ways. As we look around at the glories of blossoming orchards, and hear the melodies of birdsong, and wonder at the hidden life of tiny insects, may we embrace those signs of new life as evidence of the loving, trustworthy, holy power of life and love.  As we see the endurance of the human spirit amidst the cruel challenges of 2026, may we be enlivened as disciples of Jesus to remain committed to inclusion, justice and joy.  In all of it, may God be alive and real in your thoughts and actions, your hearts, minds and spirits, and may Christ be alive in your thoughts and actions toward others.   Alleluia! Christ is Risen.  Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!! Amen.

References cited:

Chapman, Steven Curtis.  “Spring is Coming” - Sparrow Records © 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj3DMk3NB-8

Living in Canada blog. “Sunshine hours for Canadian Cities”, https://www.livingin-canada.com/sunshine-hours-canada.html

Turner, Allie. https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/lifestyle/9-vancouver-blooms-that-arent-cherry-blossoms-to-watch-out-for-this-spring-5259094

Wikipedia, “Names of Easter”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Easter

© 2026, Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

Ezekiel 37: 1-14 - Sunday, March 22, 2026 - Lent V

 

The dream-like vision that the prophet Ezekiel had, of being in a field of dry bones that he and God partnered together to bring back to life, occurred about seventy years before the reading I preached on at our “Annual Meeting Sunday” from the 8^th chapter of Nehemiah. In that reading, people had returned from exile in Babylon to Jerusalem, and rejoiced at hearing the scriptures read aloud beside the rebuilt Temple.  By contrast, in the reading we heard today from Ezekiel, the exiles from Jerusalem and Judah had just arrived in Babylon and the future looked bleak.  Few expected to see their homeland ever again.  Amidst the gloom, the Spirit of the Lord presented Ezekiel with a vision, in a field of dry bones.  Not animal bones, but dry, human bones, as if a military regiment had got lost in the desert while doing a training exercise, and had met a grim end. 

God asks Ezekiel a question – “can these bones live?” – and Ezekiel basically turns the question back to God, “well, can they?” The late Canadian religious scholar Peter Craigie, in his wonderful commentary on Ezekiel, described what came next: “God addressed Ezekiel and told him, in effect, to preach to the bones.  As an experienced prophet, Ezekiel must have felt many times in the past that he was preaching to the dead, but never so dramatically as on this occasion; and when he began to declare God’s word, the results were equally startling.  He preached to the bones, declaring that God would restore them to life, and even as he spoke, his sermon was accompanied by a cacophony of clanking as the dead bones began to come together.  Then, before the prophet’s eyes, the reconstructed skeletons were fitted with sinew and muscles and clothed with skin.  They now looked marvellous, their skeletal appearance removed, but still they were dead.  Again, the prophet was commanded to speak; addressing the four winds, he invited the spirit (RSV ‘breath’) of God to enter the reconstituted bodies and give them life.  As he spoke, life was imparted: a great host of living persons stood up in the valley where formerly only corpses had been.” 

It is natural for us to draw the connection between this vision of this Jewish prophet, and a Christian belief in resurrection – in this case, a resurrection of an entire nation and its hope. Once more turning to Peter Craigie, we read that “this prophecy provides an extraordinary insight into the life-giving capacity of God.  (repeat) To a people whose life seemed to be over, a declaration of new life was made.  To those whose existence had become a form of living death, new horizons of hope were revealed…. The message of hope to those in exile may become a message of hope to all: that the Spirit of God imparts fulness of life to all creatures.”

I invite you to receive that on whatever level you need to hear it today.  If your faith is flagging and you need a fresh infusion of belief in the God of resurrection, the God of Jesus Christ who shares in our life and death and prepares for us a life beyond death, let that be yours.  If you are weighed down by the anger and division that is so prevalent in the world today, and the challenges faced by this beautiful planet as economic concerns overrule ecological ones, open yourself to God’s own Spirit breath, to renew your life and, hopefully, have impact on this broader scope. And if you wonder, what might this highly unusual reading about a valley of dried-out bones has to do with us, well, listen on.

At our recent Annual Meetings, each of our congregations did some preliminary looking ahead at what might come next in our gathered life, as a family of faith tasked with sharing God’s love with one another and with our neighbours.   You may have already guessed that the people of Osoyoos United Church and Oliver United Church are not the only United Church folks wondering about the future.

In recent years, the United Church of Canada has been well-aware that the numerical trends, both membership and finances, are mostly disheartening when we imagine the future.  Facing that fact is important, but that’s not where we pitch our tent, for we believe in the God of resurrection, the God of justice and reconciliation, the God who told Ezekiel to bring those dry bones back to life for they had more life to live.  Spurred on by that trust in God, and a curiosity about where God would find hope for us, our national General Council in 2025 prayerfully considered the question, “who will we be ten years from now, in 2035?”  There are ministries in our denomination that are showing signs of new life, so we are curious: what is working for them that can inform what all of us might do together?  And since we know from decades of experience that a faith that makes sense intellectually but fails to turn into meaningful action is not inspirational to younger generations, how do we articulate our call and purpose in ways that attract interest and propel us forward?

You have seen this logo (on screen), which gives visual expression to the United Church’s new call and purpose, to be a Church of deep spirituality, bold discipleship, and daring justice.  I would add to that a fourth element, something like “authentic kindness”, for wounded people of all ages in our community need safe, kind gathering places with people who are thoughtful, non-judgmental, patient, truly welcoming.  Naming this new call and purpose was an important first step in figuring out who we, as the United Church of Canada, will be going forward.

The next step, was to envision what a living, breathing Church will look like in 2035: if you will, what the valley of dry bones, the valley of Church decline looks like when the spirit of life refreshes it.  And here is the basic description, written as a present-tense statement in 2035: “in The United Church of Canada, inspired, resilient, and diverse contextual communities of disciples seek to continue the story of Jesus by embodying Christ’s presence in the world. The church is present and deeply connected coast-to-coast-to-coast in rural and urban settings, and in ecumenical and global relationships. Guided by hope-filled, adaptive and effective ministry leaders, the denomination is increasingly multigenerational, multiracial, and intercultural”.  

That’s a densely-packed statement, and impossible to cover in one sermon – so today I’m going to lift three phrases out of it.

·       Who will we be as a denomination as we move toward 2035? We will be contextual communities of disciples – that is, congregations that pay attention to the communities around them.  That, in essence, is one of the three questions Shannon put in front of us at the start of our Interim time, “who is my neighbour?” - and I think you have done well at keeping that question before you for the past eighteen months.  And in fact, over the years you have done a lot of good work looking at future vision, which relates to this call to love our neighbours.

·       What are we going to do as we move toward 2035?  We will continue the story of Jesus by embodying Christ’s presence in the world.  For many years, United Church congregations and their leaders – and I fully count myself into this number - have been baffled as to how to connect with younger generations we barely know.  Well, something we have heard consistently from young adults who DO end up in Church, is how moved they are by the brave, inclusive, loving person of Jesus and by individuals and congregations who let his unconditional love change them – congregations transformed by inclusive, socially aware love. Embodied, authentic love, the love of Christ that breathes us to life, is still the key answer in a world that enjoys hatred.

·       And what will we look like as we move toward 2035? We will be increasingly multigenerational, multiracial, and intercultural.  (And, of particular interest to Oliver as we foster a relationship with our Anglican neighbours, “ecumenical” is in there, too). What many Churches are finding, especially those in a growth phase, is that people who have come from other parts of the world are blown away by the message of love and inclusion of Jesus Christ expressed boldly and blatantly in the United Church of Canada.  Churches, rural and urban, that connect with new Canadians, open an important door to people who want to be with us. Then, of course, it’s up to the whole congregation to actually mean it – to be a people of deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice, in the name of the risen, eternally loving, completely non-judgmental Christ.

I could go on and on about this, but what I hope you are hearing in all this, is that the work that you have been about locally for some time now, of imagining what this congregation might look like in years to come, maps onto this bigger, longer view of our denomination rather well.  It’s not identical, but the road forward identified locally is not all that different from the road forward identified nationally. 

And there is one more thing. As a key aspect of the Toward 2035 initiative, our Moderator, the Right Rev. Dr. Kimberley Heath, is calling the Church to prayer.  Not a top-down, “fix all this, won’t you, God” kind of prayer, but a prayer that includes a lot of listening: listening for God, listening to one another, listening for the surprising whispers of the holy spirit, listening for what Peter Craigie called the “cacophony of clanking” as the dry bones start to come to life.  

So that’s how I’d like to end this message: in prayer.  First, we will remain seated and prayerfully sing together, “God prepare me to be a sanctuary” – {More Voices #18} --- and then I will lead us in words of prayer suggested by our General Council and Moderator…

“Gracious and loving God, you called into being This United Church of Canada, One expression of Jesus’ Beloved community, here in the particularities of our place and our time.

For the past 100 years You have guided and sustained and called us back when we have erred.

Now, as we look back We also look forward, Daring to believe That even among us, even in this very place, you are doing a new thing. We long to perceive it

Like a way through a wilderness for the sake of our neighbours, for the sake of this world of beautiful and broken things, yearning to be made whole, yearning to be made new, may we perceive and live into it. Amen.”

Let us continue in prayer, in silence or aloud:

We bring to mind, O God, the nations of the world in their most recent and perilous struggles…

Our neighbours here in the south Okanagan, as we see vines and orchards being prepared for a new growing season…

Those known to us, and those known to you, O God, who are needing love to feel real again…

And prayers for ourselves, for health, for guidance, for hope…

And now, as a child turns to her mother in hope and trust, we turn to you, O God, as we say together The Lord’s Prayer… Amen.

References cited:

Craigie, Peter C. The Daily Study Bible Series: Ezekiel. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983, pp. 259-261

The United Church of Canada, “A Listening Prayer”, accessed at https://united-church.ca/toward2035#downloads

The United Church of Canada, “Toward 2035”, https://united-church.ca/news/toward-2035-invites-communities-faith-hope-filled-bolder-future

 

© 2026 Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.

 

 

Nehemiah 8: 1-10 - Annual Meeting Sunday, March 8 and 15, 2026

 

It’s an understatement to say that the book of Nehemiah is a rather low-profile book of the Bible. And yet, the scripture we heard this morning – the only portion of Nehemiah that finds its way into our three year Sunday lectionary – is a reading that inspired one of the best sermons I’ve ever heard.  The sermon was delivered way back in seminary days by a fellow student at VST, Ted Roworth, who some of you will remember from 2004-2005 when he preached in Osoyoos.  Ted’s sermon began with his face beaming, breathlessly proclaiming, “you should have been there!” and then he described first-hand what it was like to be part of the crowd when all the people gathered in the square to hear Ezra read the Hebrew scriptures.

While the book of Nehemiah is named for a Hebrew prophet, it’s more like journalism than prophecies. You see, Nehemiah is written in the style of a first-hand account of someone who is experiencing history being written before his very eyes.  The story he tells is so important in times like ours, for he has seen the rise and fall of Empires, the hardships of the immigrant underclass, and the durability of religious life when times are tough.

Around 600 BCE, the Babylonians were THE powerful nation of the middle east but, as is always the case for powerful nations, even now, they were not content with what they had. One of their expansionist targets was the land and people of Judah.   Starting with the most skilled workers, the Jewish people were forced to leave their homeland, exiled to Babylon.  It seems that there was a surprising amount of personal and religious freedom for the Jews in Babylon, but they kept their faith alive on a household by household basis; so far as we know, gathered religious instruction or public worship services were not allowed.   But while we might regard the Babylonians as benevolent tyrants, overlords are still overlords and exile was still exile for the people of Judah, and I do not want to downplay that.  To live in exile is heartbreaking, as we have learned from the Indigenous peoples of our land who were forcibly removed from their parents to go to Residential School. In Babylon, the Jews never stopped yearning for a return to their beloved Jerusalem, and the rock-strewn hills of its surrounding countryside.

In the year 538 BCE, the Persians overthrew the Babylonians, and the people of Judah were released to return to their homeland.  But when I say homeland, in reality it was a home they knew only from the tales of their elders.  Forcibly kept away from Judah for over sixty years, generations had born and died, so virtually none of the people who were “returning home” had ever actually seen it.  They had inherited their parents’ and grandparents’ longing to return to Judah and Jerusalem, but they were, in the words of John Denver, “coming home to a place they’d never been before”. And to top it off, when they returned to the holy city of Jerusalem, they found the temple in ruins.

We pause for a moment to size this up.  Exiled: forcibly kept away for sixty years, and when they returned to this storied homeland they’d never seen, it had been trashed, and other people were living there.  Exhausted yet determined, the people put twenty years into rebuilding the Temple so they could properly worship the God of their forebears.

So here we are, at the scene described by the 8^th chapter of Nehemiah.  The Temple was rebuilt, and the men, women and children were ready for the grand opening. It was time to hear the word of God read aloud for the first time in a long time.  The crowd was too large to be inside, so they gathered in a public square just outside the new and glorious temple, and as the scribe and priest named Ezra started to read, the emotions were deep and varied: we’re told that people were bowing and weeping and shouting amens, moved to the core by the Spirit. We can only imagine the energy in that place.  The joy, the sorrow, the trauma, the fatigue all rolled together in one great big emotional, energetic mass. And for many it was bittersweet:  their parents and grandparents did not live to see this day, but they trusted that their children and grandchildren would live good lives here.

Gathered in that public square, I wonder how God’s Holy Word would have sounded to them.  The people spoke Aramaic, but the scripture scrolls were all written in Hebrew.  Ezra, knowing that this was the case, provided translators beside him on the stage, but I suspect that even without knowing the words, the people would have heard and felt the rise and fall of their mother tongue, a language of love spoken and sung by their people from the days of old. The sacred words of the old language, now spoken in real time; the old temple, destroyed, the new temple rebuilt, and as they stood there, the future of their faith was being written before them.

Many of us can identify, in a metaphorical sense at least, with living in exile.  In our families, there may be brokenness that feels like exile.  Sometimes changes in health, or the death of a loved one, can be like exile.  I feel exiled from our American neighbours, as we are kept off-balance and offended by their leaders.   And in many nations, the civility that was counted on for decades has been replaced by a divisive nastiness that splits our world into us and them, which feels like a global exile from our best selves.

And then there’s Church. When I was growing up, I could not imagine – and did not imagine – the decline of the mainline Christian Church in Canada.  When I compare what I expected with how it unfolded, it feels a bit like exile. We remember Church buildings and Sunday Schools completely full, youth from Church and community involved in CGIT and Hi-C, the women of the Church serving through the WA and WMS and, later, the UCW, the men of the Church actively involved in Church governance and, in some places, AOTS. We now know, from the stats of Rev. David Ewart, that Canadian Church attendance peaked around 1964 or 1965 and gradually diminished from then on, but in the midst of it, it didn’t feel like something declining; this United Church of ours was integral to the “fabric of Canadian society,” as central as... uh-oh… Eaton’s, and The Bay.  At times there is a hollowness within me that aches for what was. 

But exile, in the Biblical record, was eventually followed by restoration, and the unfolding of new life, as is God’s pattern, Christ’s pattern, of resurrection to life anew.  The exile was long but it did not last forever.   In the 8^th chapter of Nehemiah, the troubles in Babylonia were becoming more and more distant.  Now in Jerusalem, in the courtyard of the newly opened Temple, the people were allowed to gather, and listen, and be moved by the almighty God as they became accustomed to hearing Hebrew once more. It wasn’t perfect, but there was hope; when Ezra spoke the old words in this new place their spirits soared to the heavens.

In the Annual Meeting today, we look back a little way, as we review the year 2025, and we give thanks for everything and everyone in that recent history that contributed to the life and work of this congregation.  We are thankful for the Councils and the Committees and the Transition Team and the JET, for the efforts of all our staff, and we thank everyone for their financial contributions and the other ways you support this place. Remembering that 2025 was the year in which we marked the 100^th Anniversary of the United Church of Canada, we also look much further back with gratitude to our forebears in the faith, in this congregation and in the Churches we grew up in, and we recall with fondness the faithful who kept things alive in the lean years. 

And… and… as we look backward with gratitude, we look forward with expectancy, knowing that the Holy Spirit is, as always, leading us into new futures.  No, it’s not as dramatic as hearing Ezra read from long-neglected sacred scrolls, but I hope that you feel that new things are possible here, that God will continue to place opportunities before this community of faith.  In our eighteen months together, you have discerned your sense of identity, thought about the neighbours you are called to serve, and opened yourselves to what God is calling you to be and do.  You have expressed a desire to continue to be a people of welcome and light and unconditional love, and for your Church home (whether that’s here or St. Edward’s) to be a place where there is always room for more at the table.  Not in the same old ways, but with open ears and open eyes and open hearts, paying attention to the actual needs of your actual neighbours in a way that fits in 2026.  We are informed by who we were ten years ago, and twenty years ago, and forty years ago, and eighty years ago, but the work is today, and tomorrow, moving toward a new horizon. God is NOT done with you yet, not by a long shot.  You have identified that, and are called and empowered to lean into it.

And so we pay attention to the world, and our hearts go out to people who live in all manner of exile.  In acts of love and words of solidarity, we commit ourselves once more, to be a people of love, shaped in the image of Christ.  We hold gratitude for the fidelity of those who went before us; we give thanks for the present and for these companions on the journey; and we seek new ways of being. May we be ready for whatever will come next.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

 

 

For further reading:

Denver, John. https://johndenver.com/tracks/rocky-mountain-high-5/

Holmes, David.  “Together We Worship” video sermon, January 4, 2026.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Exile.html

 

Sarnicola, Joe. https://catholiccourier.com/articles/ezra-reads-and-helps-explain-gods-laws/

 

Tull, Patricia. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-nehemiah-81-3-5-6-8-10-3

 

© 2026, Rev Greg Wooley, Osoyoos-Oliver United Church Pastoral Charge.