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Let Us Run The Race With Perseverance

Hebrews 11 and 12:1,2

Christian discipleship is a race, says the unknown author of the book of Hebrews. It’s a race of a peculiar sort, a relay race. Some runners have run before us; others will run after us. Those who have run before us haven’t disappeared from the course. Having finished their “leg” of the race they have gathered at the finish line where they can cheer on those who are still running. Those who have already finished the race are “the great cloud of witnesses” of whom Hebrews speaks. We who are running now are surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses. They are encouraging us moment by moment, telling us constantly that any difficulty, all difficulties can be surmounted and must be surmounted if we are to join them at the finish-line.

Think of the great cloud. Abel, for instance: he kept running despite lethal harassment from a hostile brother. Joseph: he kept running despite wicked slander against him and repeated attempts to seduce him. Moses: he kept running despite the opposition of neighbours who wouldn’t have known God from a gopher. And of course the person in the “great cloud of witnesses” is our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Hebrews speaks of him as the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” We who are running now are to keep our eye on him above all. He didn’t merely run one leg of the relay race; he forged the whole race ahead of us and now summons us to keep on running with our eyes on him.

We are told not simply to run, but to run with perseverance. Plainly, nothing must be allowed to inhibit or obstruct our perseverance.

Then what is it to run with perseverance?

I: — In the first place we must keep on running regardless of detractors.

My family left Winnipeg in January, 1950. Three months later the Red River flooded. Soon the streets of downtown Winnipeg were five feet under water. (Note: we are not talking here about five feet of water in the basement, but rather five feet of water above the sidewalk.) Southern Manitoba has flooded episodically ever since the passing of the ice age.

When Mr. Duff Roblin was premier of Manitoba thirty years ago he legislated the construction of a huge floodway along one side of Winnipeg that carries off the overflow from the two rivers — the Red and the Assiniboine — that rise dangerously every spring. The floodway cost $58 million. For this public expenditure Duff Roblin was pilloried in the legislative assembly. His political opponents “ate him alive”, all the while ridiculing his project as “Duff’s Ditch”.

It so happens that Duff’s Ditch is going to spare Winnipeg from the flood when the flood inundates everything else around Winnipeg. It so happens that Duff’s Ditch has spared the city of Winnipeg colossal damage on at least ten occasions. It so happens that Duff’s Ditch has saved the city billions of dollars.

Roblin paid a very high price for his perseverance. No matter! He stands vindicated now!

In the race of discipleship to run with perseverance means we shall keep on running regardless of detractors.

II: — In the second place to run with perseverance means we shall keep on running regardless of distractions. We must run singlemindedly; run with a focus, a concentration, a determination that is aware only of the matter at hand. We must run with an intensity that unfailingly announces our steadfastness.

I am gripped whenever I see a singleminded intensity that sheds distractions. Recently I saw Itzhak Perlman (reputed to be the world’s finest violinist) playing a “pop” concert. He was playing the music from the movie, Schindler’s List. He had already played the music when the sound track was made for the film. Now he was playing it again before a live audience.

The audience was relaxed, comfortable, cool. Perlman, however; perspiration streamed off him. Playing music associated with the Holocaust plainly strained the Jewish violinist. Still, he matched the strain with his own strenuousness and kept on playing as only he can play, sweat-soaked while spectators coolly enjoyed the music.

Regardless of what it was costing him Perlman wasn’t going to spare himself; neither was he going to let anything distract him. In his singleminded concentration he wasn’t even aware of would-be distractions.

How different it was with the woman in the relay race during a recent Olympic Games. She was running her “leg” of the race, baton in hand, when a mean-spirited opponent elbowed her in the ribs. Jabbed, in pain now, and momentarily breathless, she “lost it”. Angrily, petulantly — understandably, to be sure, yet foolishly nonetheless — she threw her baton at the woman who had fouled her. When she threw her baton she threw away the race. She disqualified herself; she disqualified her entire team. Instantly she grasped what she had done and stopped running.

In the course of life we do get fouled. We get jabbed. We get “clobbered”. We get victimized in a thousand different ways. The one thing we must never do is allow our manifold victimizations to distract us. We must never allow them to distract us so that we lose our focus, our singlemindedness, our intensity, our horizon-filling dedication to the task at hand. We must never allow our manifold victimizations to move us into that space where we “throw it all away” with the result that the only thing left is to stop running.

To run with perseverance is to keep on running regardless of distractions.

III: — In the third place to run with perseverance means we shall keep on running patiently. The race of Christian discipleship isn’t a sprint that ends in 9.35 seconds. It’s a long race, a lifelong race. We must run patiently.

Before the dismantling of the Berlin wall in 1989; before the dissolution of the Soviet Union; when the USSR was a totalitarian tormenter; in those days one of the USSR’s military heroes was denounced publicly. Col. Lev Ofsischer had been a flier in the Soviet Air Force in World War II. He had distinguished himself in the Battle of Stalingrad, that great turning point in the war. He was an Air Force hero, and his name and photograph were featured in a book depicting the Battle of Stalingrad and his place in it.

In a subsequent edition of the book his name and photograph had been removed. His rank — colonel — had been reduced to private. And his pension had been cancelled. What had he done to bring this on himself? In 1967 he had asked the soviet government to permit him to emigrate to Israel. Permission was denied. Meanwhile a Baptist Christian had given him a bible. (Ofsischer had grown up in communist Russia where bibles were illegal, and had grown up thoroughly secularized.) In 1977, ten years later, he was still denied permission to emigrate. For ten years he had read the bible that the Christian missionary had given him, and in those ten years had learned the history of his people’s frustrations in the biblical era alone.

The KGB (soviet secret police) told him that if he withdrew his application to emigrate his Air Force pension would be restored. Ofsischer told the KGB that if he had to choose between pension and honour there was no choice: he would never besmirch his honour for the sake of a pension.

The KGB told him he might as well give up. “You’ve already waited ten years !”, they said. “Wrong!”, replied Ofsischer, “I haven’t waited ten years. I have waited 2000 years; and I can wait a few more.”

To run with perseverance is always to run patiently.

IV: — Important as it is to run regardless of detractors, run regardless of distractions, run patiently, it isn’t enough: we must also run so as to finish.

Another Olympic Games, this time in Mexico City, 1968. It was the marathon race: 26 miles, 385 yards. The first-place runner crossed the finish line, then the second, the third, and so on. As the last runner, it would seem, straggled in, the spectators and camera crews noticed an ambulance with lights flashing several hundred yards up the course. The flashing lights warned the crowds not to surge onto the track as the race wasn’t yet over. One runner remained on the track.

This fellow had come from a developing country in the two-thirds world. His nation had no funds for state-sponsored training programs. The people had simply sent him off with whatever encouragement they could press upon him. Now he was running with men whose economic privilege gave them enormous advantage.

This fellow, ambulance alongside him, would stagger a few feet and fall on his face, get up and stagger a few more feet and go down again, over and over until he had traversed the last few hundred yards. When asked why he had persevered at such a price he replied, “My people didn’t send me here to compete (they knew I couldn’t compete); they didn’t even send me here to run; they sent me here to finish.”

My final word to those whose race-running we are recognizing this morning is this: be sure to run so as to finish. It is only as we finish — who cares if we get to our goal with scraped knees and bleeding face? — it is only as we finish that we find ourselves admitted to the great cloud of witnesses in the company of our elder brother, Jesus. And it is only as we finish that God himself is glorified.

Victor Shepherd
May 1997

Not a Spirit of Fear, but a Spirit of Power and Love and Self-Control

2 Timothy 1:7

It began as a youth movement. To be sure, older people possess greater wisdom, sounder judgement, broader perspective. Our Lord knew this. Nevertheless he began with younger people. When he stepped forth on his public ministry he was in his late 20s. The twelve whom he called to him were likely no older. Paul took Mark on Paul’s first missionary journey when Mark was estimated to be 19. You know what happened: Mark behaved like a 19 year old. He couldn’t withstand the hardship of the venture, left Paul and returned home. When Paul and Barnabas were about to set off on another missionary journey Paul said, “We can’t take Mark with us; we simply can’t afford to have him let us down again”. Barnabas disagreed. “He was only 19; give him another chance”. Paul and Barnabas parted over Mark; they parted amicably, without grudge or resentment, but they parted. Barnabas, however, was vindicated, since Mark proved himself on the second venture.

Why the emphasis on youth? Is it not because along with the broader perspective and greater stability of middle age there is also boredom, apathy, and more than a little cynicism? Several older clergymen have said to me with that bone-deep weariness born of disillusionment, “Shepherd, wait until you have been in this game as long as I have”.

There is another reason for our Lord’s beginning with younger people: what we have to contend with in our youth we are going to have contend with for the remainder of our lives. I am always amused when an older adult pretends that his adolescence has been put behind him forever. Years ago (1970), in my final year of theology, I studied under Dr. James Wilkes, a psychiatrist from whom I learned an immense amount. He mentioned one day that emotionally our adolescence lurks just below the surface of our adult psyche. The coping mechanisms, for instance, that we developed as adolescents are the coping mechanisms we shall have for a long time. Similarly, what we had to contend with “back” when we were adolescents we shall have to contend with throughout life. Jesus began with younger people inasmuch as what they learned from him at that time they would need and would have for the rest of their lives. A sermon, then, that has to do with younger people cannot fail to speak to older people as well.

[1] Paul writes to Timothy, who is only 19 or 20 himself, and says, “Remember! God did not give us a spirit of timidity, a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and self-control”. Plainly the older apostle knows that young Timothy is afraid.

Are we afraid? (Does the sun rise in the east?) There are days when our fears are so slight as to be scarcely noticeable, and other days when they muscle everything else out of our minds. Some of our fears we readily understand. The company we work for has merged with a larger company and not all management and executive personnel are going to be retained. Our child seems unwell and we have just enough medical knowledge as not to be put off by our friends’ reassurances that there is nothing wrong. We are afraid that the psychological booby-trap which we have known of for years and which we have disguised, stepped around or hidden; that situation where we do not cope and where we appear so helpless, weak and silly – we fear it’s going to become publicly evident and we shall be humiliated. We are afraid that since we are not married yet we are never going to be married. (I also meet people who are afraid that since they are married now they are never going to get unmarried.) And then there is a different kind of fear, unattached to any specific object or occurrence. “Existential anxiety” is the term mental health experts use. Existential anxiety is that niggling, lapping, semi-conscious awareness of our fragility, our frailty, our ultimate powerlessness in the face of life’s accidentality and our own mortality.

The preacher keeps reminding us that “Fear not” is the most frequent command on the lips of Jesus. His telling us to fear not, we feel nonetheless, has as much effect on us as our going down to Lake Ontario and telling the waves to stop rolling in.

I shall never make light of that fear which is part of the human condition. It is as undeniable as toothache. Then what do I do with respect to my own fears? On those days when my fears seem nearly overwhelming I look to two treasure-stores: the promises of God and my Christian friends. The promises of God are glorious. The simplest promise comes from the book of Joshua: “I will not fail you or forsake you”. The psalms are a goldmine: “This I know, that God is for me… what can man do to me?” John tells us that even if our hearts condemn us, the God of unfathomable mercy is greater than our hearts. And then there are those promises from the heart and pen of Paul: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s”; “If God is for us, who is against us?”; “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose”. And of course there is the climax of all of scripture, as far as I am concerned, Romans 8:38: “Neither death nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

When Paul tells Timothy that we have not been given a spirit of fear he doesn’t mean that we are never afraid. Paul himself was often afraid; he speaks unashamedly of his own fear. Our Lord was fearful on occasion. To tell people they should never fear is to send them in pursuit of the unrealistic and the ridiculous; it’s also to plunge them into false guilt.

To have a “spirit of fear” is something different; it’s to be so fear-saturated as to be deflected from our obedience to God. But a spirit of fear is precisely what we haven’t been given; therefore we mustn’t yield to it. We must fling ourselves upon the promises of God.

Yet I must admit that there have been occasions in my life when even the promises of God seemed to evaporate on me; occasions when fear fell on me like a building collapsing or seeped into me like poison gas. On these occasions the promises seemed ineffective, however true, unable to stem the dread whose waves came upon me like nausea. On these occasions I have leaned my full weight on Christian friends, for they embody for us, incarnate for us, the truth of the promises in those moments when we are floundering and the promises seem to support us only as embodied in our friends.

[2] If God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, then what has he given us? Paul reminds Timothy once again: a spirit of power and love and self-control.

(a) The one question which younger people always have concerning the gospel is also the simplest question. Their one question isn’t, “Is it true?”, because younger people suspect it might be true but also be trite; true but also pointless; true but too abstract, too remote to be of any earthly use. Their one question concerning the gospel is, “Does it work?” “Does it work?” means “Is it effective?” Whether it is effective depends entirely on what end it is supposed to effect. The question, “Is a hammer effective?” depends on the end you have in mind. If your purpose is to drive nails the answer is plainly “yes”. If you wish to crochet lace doilies the answer is plainly “no”. If you want to repair the nozzle of your garden hose the answer is “maybe”. “Does the gospel work?” — the answer here depends on what it is we are looking to see happen. The textbook-correct answer is that the gospel works, is effective, inasmuch as it is the purpose of the gospel to reconcile us to God and render us transparent before him; since the gospel does this (alone does this) therefore the gospel works and should be embraced by every last person, older and younger alike. But the answer is too slick and too abstract by half. What reconciliation to God and transparency to him means is something we older people must exemplify ourselves if what we say about it is to have any weight. For a long time I have felt that Maureen and I should are an advertisement of the gospel for our grandchildren. In other words, younger people (who are much less readily deceived than older people) are going to conclude that the gospel works only if they have seen something of its work in us.

One feature of younger people that always appeals to me is their forthrightness. If you ask them about last night’s rock concert they will reply without hesitation, “It was a drag” or “It was out of sight”. Older people are adept at verbal smokescreens; younger people don’t bother with word-camouflages, for they are suspicious that much talk is a cover-up covering up an embarrassing lack of substance. There was an embarrassing lack of substance in the Christian community of Corinth . The church-members there yammered a lot, lined up behind different hero-figures in the congregation, fancied themselves worldly-wise and talked up their pseudo-wisdom; they rationalized the inexcusable even as they told each other how truthful they were. Finally Paul had had enough. He let them know that their pretension to wisdom was nothing more than arrogance. He let them know that he would visit the congregation soon and deal with these motor-mouths himself. His conviction about the nature of the gospel and his resolve to hold the congregation to the gospel are evident in his concluding line: “I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but their power. For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power”.

Not a spirit of fear has God given us but a spirit of power.

(b) And also a spirit of love. Everyone has her own understanding of love; but it’s the gospel’s understanding that matters for us. And the gospel makes plain that God’s love is a self-giving which pours itself self-forgetfully upon anyone at all without concern for consequence or cost.

Young people have no difficulty understanding this: self-forgetful self-giving without concern for consequence or cost. It’s all so very lofty, even adventurous, that it appears as attractive as it seems true.

But younger people do not remain younger. As older age settles upon them little by little the cost seems prohibitively high. At the same time the consequence (the result) seems woefully meagre, given the high cost. (The entire scheme plainly isn’t “cost-effective”, as the economists say.) What happens next? Self-giving is shrivelled to thing-giving; self-forgetfulness is shrivelled to calculation; the cost of love is simply deemed too high and the consequences too scanty. Next step, the last step: we settle down into that token-generosity whose tokenism the world accepts because tokenism is all the world expects of anyone with respect to anything. How is such world-weary disillusionment to be avoided?

There are two ways of avoiding such disillusionment. One is by returning constantly to our text: God has given us a spirit of love; not a notion of love, but a spirit of love. Plainly there is an allusion to the Holy Spirit, that power in which God himself acts upon his people. Then God himself must — and will — keep our hearts from shrivelling up into that tokenism that is widely regarded as good enough.

The second way of avoiding the world-weary disillusionment that reduces love to a mere artificiality which is socially acceptable; the second way is to keep people dear to us. Writing to the people in Thessalonica Paul says, “We were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our very selves (this is what love is finally, sharing our very selves) so dear had you become to us.” The longer I live the dearer people become to me. When I was a younger minister I was so taken up with getting the job-functions done — writing the sermon, chairing the meeting, conducting the funeral — that my focus was on the function, with people more or less on the periphery. In my older age the function seems to perform itself, and people have become the focus. One reason that I have relished being a pastor is that people — all kinds and qualities — have become dearer to me with every passing year. As they do I find today’s text confirming itself to me with greater force: God has given us a spirit of love, and this gift will keep our love from shrivelling up to a pasted-on smile plus a “townie.”

(c) We have also been given a spirit of self-control. Self-control appears to be the opposite of other-control. Either we control ourselves or others control us; other people, other ideologies, other things. When this happens – i.e., when we are other-controlled – we are little more than an empty tin can kicked around endlessly: empty to start with and soon shapeless as well. This is not good. What is the alternative? A minute ago I said that self-control appears to be the opposite of other-control; “appears” because there is one glorious instance where self-control and other-control are one and the same. When Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5 he is listing the qualities of life which Jesus Christ effects in his people by his Spirit. Included in the list is self-control. Christ-control is self-control. You see, to be Christ-controlled is to know whose we are: we are his and his only! And to know whose we are (when we are Christ’s) is to know who we are: we are our “self”. Since Jesus Christ renders me who I am, to be Christ-controlled will always be to be self-controlled.

For whether we are younger or older, whether we are newcomers to the faith or oldtimers in the household and family of God, we were never given a spirit of fear; we have all been given a spirit of power, of love, and of self-control.

Victor Shepherd
May 2007

The Meaning and Timing of Confirmation

I: — Many of you have voiced to me your misgivings concerning confirmation, the service itself as well as the understanding behind the ritual. No one has suggested that we cancel the service outright. Nonetheless, even those who have never suggested that the event be cancelled continue to express serious reservations about it. A few people are plainly cynical. I imagine that virtually everyone feels that something isn’t quite right with confirmation; something important is somehow not happening, a mythology if not a superstition has taken hold, a game of “let’s pretend” is being played even though most of us can’t really pretend any longer. While almost no one is content with the current practice of confirmation, no one appears to have an alternative.

Everyone knows what happens on Confirmation Sunday. Some of the confirmands we know well. We have seen them and their parents at worship for years. Other confirmands we don’t know at all. We don’t recognize the surname, aren’t acquainted with the parents, assume that the youngster is being confirmed simply because his parents have made him come to the six or seven mandatory classes and get himself “done”, the parents plainly attaching much superstition to getting “done.”

When adults wish to join our congregation through transfer of membership the secretary asks for the transfer, only to learn, quite frequently, that the person in question was not a member of the previous congregation; may have attended, but was never formally a member. I then ask the person in question if she was ever confirmed. Very often she replies that she doesn’t know; she can’t remember whether she was ever confirmed. Were I to ask her, “Did you ever get married?”, she would be able to reply instantly. Apparently confirmation is not particularly memorable.

And then there are the photographs, in the hallway outside the choir room, of the confirmation classes of years past. Where are all those young people today? As painful as it is to say it, would it be truer to say that confirmation is less the congregation’s welcome to the young people than it is their good-bye wave to us?

Many people understand confirmation as a kind of graduation. Once we have graduated from high school, for instance, we don’t go back. Once we have graduated from “church” (Sunday School being a form of church) we don’t go back.

And then there is an aspect to the confirmation service which should jar us all, that part of the service where hands are laid upon the candidate. There is only one other service in the church where hands are laid upon a candidate: ordination to the ministry. Obviously there is close connection between the meaning of confirmation in the faith and the meaning of ordination to the ministry. What is the connection? What would we think of candidates for the ministry who were ordained at a public service and then promptly disappeared from church life?

Then of course there are the promises made during the service itself. One such promise is that the confirmand will be diligent in attendance at public worship. The promise is made by the confirmand and heard by the congregation when everyone knows that diligent attendance at public worship is the last thing many confirmands (and their parents) have in mind.

The promises are followed by the commissioning: “Go out into the world to fulfil your high calling as a servant and soldier of Jesus Christ.” “Go out into the world”: it appears that the theatre, the venue of the Christian’s discipleship is vast. “Servant of Christ”: it appears that extreme self-denial is involved. “Soldier of Christ”: it appears that hardship is cheerfully to be endured. What do we expect a 15 year old to make of all this?

Lastly, at a recent meeting of the Christian Education Committee grave misgivings were voiced concerning the adequacy of six or seven 45-minute sessions as preparation for an event as momentous as confirmation. Frankly, I don’t think that six or seven sessions times 45 minutes is adequate preparation. But surely these sessions aren’t the preparation! Surely the profounder preparation is 15 years of Christian formation through exposure to Christian truth and the Christian way embodied in congregational life and witness.

II: — Many people have asked me about the timing of confirmation, the age at which young people make public promises and are said to be “confirmed”. Why age 15? I simply don’t know. I suspect that it has much to do with the fact that around this age people graduate from elementary school and move on to high school. At the same time, Sunday School customarily concludes for people 14 or 15 years old. When I was new in Streetsville I commented, at a C.E. meeting, that I was concerned about the immediate disappearance of so many confirmees. I suggested that we try something different: postpone the event for a few years to see if the losses were as great then. My suggestion was shot down instantly. “If we postpone the class we might lose those people”, I was told right away. Might lose them? But the present practice has scarcely kept them! I cannot believe that we have genuinely, profoundly “kept” people within the fellowship of the congregation just because their names have been added to record-books.

(I’ll say more about timing later. Let’s move on to the meaning of confirmation.)

III: — The meaning of the service is stated plainly in the service itself. “When those who have been baptized as children have grown up and have been taught the essentials of Christian faith and duty, they come before the church to own for themselves the covenant (i.e., the promises) of their baptism. In this act they confess Jesus Christ openly as Saviour and Lord that they may be confirmed by the Holy Spirit and welcomed to the Lord’s table.” (Let me say in passing that I should welcome any person of any age to the Lord’s table at any time, confirmed or not.) The major point in all this is that those being confirmed now own for themselves and publicly endorse the promises which their parents made on their behalf as infants on the day their parents had them baptized.

Everywhere in the New Testament baptism is a sign of several things. (i) It is a sign of repentance. To repent is to change direction. Christians take their marching orders from a different leader. We walk resolutely that road which leads to the kingdom of God. Other roads — self-inflating ambition, wealth for the sake of wealth, social superiority, self-indulgence — these roads we shun as we move in the direction of the kingdom. (ii) Baptism is a sign of faith. Faith is keeping company with Jesus Christ. Living unashamedly in his company, we share his identity. We are publicly known as those who know him and love him and obey him. (iii) Baptism is commissioning for service. While we certainly love our Lord, we do more than merely love him; we work in his name, work on behalf of others whom he loves as surely as he loves us. (iv) Baptism means one thing more. It means that the repentance and faith and service we exercise, we exercise inasmuch as God’s own Spirit, God himself, has touched us and moved us and constrained us. We haven’t “decided”, of ourselves, to follow Jesus the way we decide to buy a Ford instead of a Chevrolet or a bungalow instead of a townhouse. We are disciples inasmuch as our Lord called us; our resistance melted and we couldn’t do anything else.

Baptism means this. Parents make promises concerning all of this for their children when their children are baptized. Then the day comes when the child, now much older, recognizes what his parents have sought for him for years. He recognizes too that he wants this now for himself. Therefore he owns it all for himself and publicly declares that this is what he will pursue until life ends.

When I was pondering the meaning of “confirm” I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. The O.E.D. gives four meanings for “confirm”. (i) to establish more firmly. Certainly when people are confirmed we want their discipleship to be established more firmly. (ii) to corroborate. Certainly we want their zeal for discipleship to be corroborated, supported, by the Holy Spirit and by others. (iii) to encourage a person in a habit or an opinion. Certainly we want confirmands to persist in the habit of discipleship and persist in their conviction of truth. (iv) the fourth meaning the O.E.D. discusses only in the past tense. It uses the illustration, “confirmed drunkard”, and mentions synonyms like “inveterate”, meaning “life-long”. And certainly we want confirmands to aspire after life-long loyalty to their Lord.

The United Church service speaks of being “confirmed by the Holy Spirit”. We should all want to add, “and by the congregation as well.”

IV: — This is what the service means. How do you feel now about our confirmation practice? Having asked the question, I am in no position to receive 300 replies at this time. But I shall gladly hear from any of you at any other time.

Having asked you a question, I can only go on talking myself. What I say next is only my opinion. Feel free to disagree with it, modify it, endorse it or bury it.

I think we need many “rites of spiritual passage” in our church life. There is nothing wrong with a public service for people 14 or 15 years old, a service which acknowledges the Christian formation they have undergone so far in their lives, a service which points them ahead to deeper understanding and faith and service, a service which encourages them to persist more profoundly in it. Therefore I am not suggesting for a minute that we eliminate the “rite of spiritual passage” for people of this age.

At the same time I have long felt that the kind of promise we ask young people to make at this age we should defer to a later age. We all agree that no 14 or 15 year old should be asked to make a promise concerning marriage. (For that matter no 17 year old should be asked, either.) We don’t ask 15 year olds to make promises concerning marriage because we know that they cannot understand the force of what they are pledging. Might it not be the same with respect to the promises made at confirmation? Teenage years are often characterized by religious enthusiasms, but also characterized by religious denunciations; doubts, perplexities, denials of all that their parents have cherished, questions, uncertainties, contradictions. A Roman Catholic woman remarked to me that when her daughter was 16 her daughter was vowing every day to become a nun; when her daughter was 17 she couldn’t get her daughter out of bed and to church on Sunday morning.

Teenagers 14, 15, 16 years old feel they have to question everything. There is nothing wrong with this. After all, none of us wants our children to grow up uncritical, mindless dupes. At this age too teenagers become aware that the world as it is is not quite the neat, cosy, justly-ordered world of their early childhood. They learn that there is nothing in the real world which unfolds like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They learn now of the evil which excoriates the world, of the shocking unfairness which riddles life, of the misery in which most of the world’s people will have to live. And then they put all of this against the supposed goodness and mercy of God.

At this age too teenagers learn of the arguments brought against faith by Freud and Marx and Darwin. Dealing with these arguments may be “old hat” to a middle-aged person like me, but to a 15 year old it is all so new, so startling, so powerful as to hang a huge question mark above all that he has understood to date of the Christian faith. I often feel that the confirmation process stifles the teenagers’ searching, their inquisitiveness, their wrestling issues to the ground, when we should be encouraging all of this; we smother precisely what we should stimulate. Of course we should support them while they search. But what is to be gained by exerting pressure from parents, peers and congregation upon a teenager to conform to the confirmation practice when all the while some of them, at least, want to cry out, “But I’m not convinced yet; and I have many more questions; and why do I have to submit to this?”

I have long felt that we need to support youngsters throughout this searching, questioning, doubting, probing phase; support them and encourage them in it, and wait for them to emerge on the other side of it with a faith they have hammered out for themselves and can own without reservation. At this point, I feel, we should have another public “rite of spiritual passage” for those who are now 22 or 25 or 28 — or 55.

V:– While the congregation owns and supports teenagers throughout this process and then publicly celebrates the culmination of their search, its flowering into fruit-bearing faith, the congregation should also, I feel, recognize, own, support all kinds of people who act in the congregation’s name. Yes, we do recognize the UCW leadership each year when we install the executive. “Install”? We install heavy appliances, like stoves, fridges, washers and dryers. We shouldn’t “install” these women; we should commission them. We should commission them on behalf of the UCW for the ultimate blessing of the whole congregation. We shouldn’t “install” Sunday School teachers as we call it at present. We should commission them to bring to children, in the way that children can understand, the faith which this congregation as a whole owns. We commission the teachers to render this service for us.

What about the prime neighbours? We need a service which sets forth the way in which the neighbouring program extends Christian hospitality, and what we are trusting to result from this ministry.

The thrust of the visiting program is different. Whereas the prime neighbours have others into their own homes, the visitors go out to other people’s homes, with a different purpose in view. We need a service which recognizes this and commissions them for it.

Youth work in the congregation: youth group, girls’ work, Boy Scout/Girl Guide work. It all happens here in the congregation. We need a public service of recognition, gratitude and commissioning.

VI: –And then I think there may be one thing more needed. Perhaps we need to allow an individual to speak on Sunday morning from time to time. Not to make an announcement in the announcement period, but rather to share her testimony of God’s victory somewhere in her life, or to request special intercession of us in special circumstances, or to lay an extraordinary concern before us which is searing her heart. Do we need a place for this as well?

VII: — Let me say again what I said a minute ago. You asked for a sermon on the meaning and timing of confirmation. I have put before you my best thinking on the subject. But it is only mine. I need to hear yours. Speak to me, to anyone on the Official Board, to anyone on the Christian Education Committee, to anyone in the Sunday School. But be sure to let us know what is on your mind.

F I N I S

Victor A. Shepherd
January 1994

Lest We Forget – Remembrance Day 1998

Is. 2:1-4
Mat. 10:34-39
Mat. 5:9

[1] For years now I’ve arrived at church on Remembrance Day with my heart in my mouth. For years I’ve wondered what our service says to people of Germany ancestry. Have we implied, however unintentionally, that German people are the ogres of the world? that they are people of impenetrable hardness and incorrigible cruelty? Oh yes, we in Streetsville United are both orthodox enough and charitable enough to say we agree with the prophet Jeremiah that the heart of everyone, everyone without exception, is “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, beyond understanding.” (Jer. 17:9) But even as we say we agree with the prophet do we quietly qualify the statement so as to suggest that the hearts of one nation in particular are especially corrupt and unusually ununderstandable? The last thing I want to do today is foster the myth of superiority; namely, that some of us are superior because our hearts are more benign than the hearts of others.

Yes, the two major wars of this century found Germany our enemy and France our ally. If we were to push back one century earlier, however, we’d find the situation reversed: France was the enemy and Germany the ally. Following the battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington defeated the French forces, Wellington remarked, “Never have I come so close to losing.” He would have lost for sure had the British troops not been supported by German forces. In other words, labels like “enemy” and “ally” change in a twinkling.

Think of the United States. We Canadians have been allies of the U.S. throughout this century, as have the British. But the British and the Americans haven’t always been allies. They warred in 1776 and 1812. The Citadel, that massive fortress in Quebec City, was constructed in the last century to protect you and me from the Americans. At the turn of the century British and American navies vied for superiority just in case the two countries went to war again. The United States had on file plans for war against Great Britain as late as 1932. When the Parti Quecbecois came to power in Quebec in 1976 and began talking about asserting sovereignty over the St.Lawrence Seaway and impeding American access to electricity and fresh water, the United States government moved an entire infantry division (10,000 men) to upstate New York opposite Kingston so as to be able to move immediately should American interests be threatened. We mustn’t assume that because America is Canada’s ally today it will always be Canada’s ally.

The expression “concentration camp” has been especially distasteful in the past one hundred years. Who invented the concentration camp? Not the Germans; the British developed concentration camps in their war against the Dutch in South Africa. The Dutch suffered more fatalities in the camps than they suffered through enemy fire. Jeremiah is correct. Human sinnership is universal.

At the same time, while all hearts are deceitful and corrupt, there do occur in history particular concentrations of evil that are to be resisted relentlessly. We can’t use our common sinnership as an excuse for not resisting the appearance of a particular evil, a concentration of evil. Nazism was such an appearance, such a concentration.

[2] While there are many aspects to the evil of Nazism that we could discuss today we are going to examine one in particular: Nazism’s victimization of the Jewish people. We mustn’t think that the holocaust was simply part of the war, or at least a consequence of the war, neither more nor less evil than war inevitably is. The holocaust was unprecedented as evil for the sake of evil. Acts of war are customarily undertaken for the sake of something else. A military invasion, for instance, is undertaken for the sake of acquiring territory. Acts of war are customarily viewed as evil (at least by victors) even as those acts of war are undertaken for the sake of garnering natural resources or restoring national reputation or expanding “living room.” The holocaust occurred for none of these reasons; it was evil for the sake of evil.

We should consider several respects in which the holocaust differs from acts of war. Wars are fought by competing parties where both parties have power. Both parties may not have equal power, but both parties have some power. The Jewish people had no power. They made up less than 1% of Germany’s population. They had no access to the armed forces or the government. They were never a threat to the Third Reich; they couldn’t be. Therefore the aggression visited on them can’t be called an act of war.

Neither should we regard the holocaust as another of those collateral “spillovers” of war. Wartime “spillovers” occur when passions are unleashed inadvertently and people are found behaving subhumanly. The holocaust, however, wasn’t the result of mindless passion loosed unintentionally. The holocaust, rather, was planned with utmost rationality, executed with utmost deliberation, perpetrated with utmost detachment. Passion is spent quickly. If the holocaust had been the result of passion loosed in the course of war, it wold have disappeared as quickly as it flared up. It didn’t disappear, however, in that it had never flared up. It was coolly conceived, rationally implemented, deliberately executed, dispassionately protracted. It wasn’t done as a result of collective loss of self-control; it was done with utmost self-control. It was evil for the sake of evil.

Neither should we regard the holocaust as yet another instance of racism. Needless to say, the Nazis were racists. But they weren’t anti-semites because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-semites. The Nazis, we should remember, pronounced the Japanese to be honorary Aryans! Since the Japanese were honorary Aryans, the Nazis weren’t racist in principle. They were racist to the extent that they were anti-semitic in principle. Moreover, racism asserts that some races are humanly inferior. In North America black people have been deemed inferior to white people; in central Africa, brown people inferior to black people. The Jewish people weren’t deemed humanly inferior, however; they were deemed not human at all but rather verminous. The racially inferior are customarily enslaved; vermin is always exterminated.

Neither were the Jewish people mere scapegoats in the holocaust. To be sure, in the early stages of the Nazi movement they were used as scapegoats. Jews were blamed for all of Germany’s woes; they were blamed for Germany’s loss of international prestige, its financial collapse, it’s defeat and humiliation in World War I. Very quickly, however, the Jewish people ceased to be a scapegoat for anything. As long as any were to be found alive they were to be ferreted out, degraded, and then murdered. Now they were singled out as evil was done for the sake of evil. Auschwitz wasn’t the first time they had been singled out. They had been singled out at Sinai. There, however, they had been singled out for life and a task. Now they were singled out for torment and slaughter.

Let’s be sure we are clear on a point that most people confuse: the holocaust wasn’t an aspect of Germany’s war effort, however misguided. The holocaust wasn’t perpetrated because it was thought to advance Germany’s war effort. It was never going to advance the war effort. By 1943-44 the tide was turning against Germany. An all-out effort was needed if Germany was to regain military ascendancy. Freight trains were needed desperately to transport materials to troop-fronts and airfields and naval depots. These trains were diverted to other destinations and used to transport people to death camps. Zeal for the holocaust undermined the war effort. After D-Day it was obvious that Germany would be defeated. Allied leaders announced that those who were orchestrating the holocaust would be tried, at war’s end, as war criminals and punished. And still the zeal for the holocaust didn’t abate. The holocaust wasn’t an aspect of the war effort; it jeopardized the war effort. It was evil for the sake of evil.

[3] In light of such monstrosity we ought never to undervalue the sacrifice that so many Canadians made in the face of it. We ought never to undervalue it, even though we persist in downgrading it to a trifle, even denouncing it. If you think I invent or exaggerate let me refer you to several textbooks in Canadian history written by Canadians for use in Canadian university and highschool classrooms. Discounting the 30,000 men Canada lost in the last war; discounting the 10,000 air crew that were lost in defeating Germany the only way Germany could be defeated, the most recent textbooks on Canadian history discuss Canada’s contribution in only a paragraph or two if they discuss it at all. I consider all such Canadian writers of Canadian history to be violating the ninth commandment, the commandment that enjoins us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. I consider all such revisionism to be disgusting, as revisionism always is.

When the best-selling, two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples comes to discuss the different fronts on which Canadians fought in World War II, its entire discussion lasts one paragraph. Robert Martin, a law professor at the University of Western Ontario whose father perished in the last war, pointed out in a November, 1991 newspaper article that recent history textbooks in Canada had “airbrushed” off the page the sacrifice Canadians made. In a November, 1996 submission to the Globe and Mail a school vice-principal from Surrey, B.C., asked why, on Remembrance Day, her school should have “some veteran…come in and stand up there and bore us all to death with his medals.” When “Victory in Europe” Day was being highlighted overseas (particularly in Holland) Nova Scotia’s Ministry of Education provided no curriculum resources concerning the event of V-E Day and the anniversary celebration currently underway. One board of education in Nova Scotia, however, did hold a daylong training session for teachers on the topic of human rights. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t tragic. Had the Third Reich lasted 1000 years as planned, no teacher would be sitting around a coffee urn discussing human rights. In 1996 an attempt was made to provide curriculum resources for Remembrance Day in Ontario’s schools. The Ministry of Education at Queen’s Park stifled the attempt.

What occurs at the provincial level occurs at the federal as well. In 1992 the CBC and the National Film Board colluded to show on national television The Valour and the Horror. Brian and Terence McKenna, the two men who crafted the details and mood of the movie, implied that the RCAF was a clone of the Nazis. We should note that while the movie vilifying Canadian airmen had the support of the CBC, the CBC refused to air No Price Too High, the response of air force veterans. Canadians forget because Canadians are programmed to forget.

The Dutch, on the other hand; the Dutch don’t forget. The Dutch remember because they want to remember. In May, 1995, the Dutch people festooned their homes and streets with banners commemorating the Canadians’ liberation of Holland. The Dutch have never pretended that Canadian efforts were of the same order as those of the Nazis. The Dutch remember the brutality of the occupation. They know who Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boom were. They remember the cold-blooded killing of underground resistors who were captured. They remember the treachery and ignominy of fellow-citizens who collaborated. Does this mean that the Dutch harbour an ever-festering hatred towards Germans? Of course not. Myself, I have found very few Dutch people who don’t speak some German and are glad to speak it. The border between Holland and Germany today isn’t armed; in fact, it isn’t even manned. There’s only a sign that tells travelers they are leaving one country and entering another. Dutch and German forces train together today in NATO exercises.

Still, the Dutch remember what Canadians did for them. They take entire schools to the cemeteries of Canadian servicemen and remind their schoolchildren that political freedom comes with price tag attached. On the anniversary of V-E Day in 1995, fifteen thousand Canadian veterans marched through the city of Apeldoorn. The parade was scheduled to last two hours; it lasted eight, so frequently did the Dutch people run into the parade to hug, bedeck and press gifts upon the veterans. Mothers still in their twenties held up their infants so that the baby might receive a veteran’s kiss. The Dutch remember because they have reason to remember. We Canadians have reason too. Yet the CBC refused to televise No Price Too High. PBS, an American network, aired the film in any case.

[4] Yet as fine as Canada’s contribution was in the last Great War, Christians can never pretend that war is glorious, let alone godly. General George Patton was never more wrong when he said, “War is humankind’s noblest effort.” What can be noble about the human activity that advertises our innermost depravity and outermost wretchedness? What can be noble about the spectacle of those created in the image and likeness of God sparing no effort to maim and kill others made in the image and likeness of God? So far from being glorious, war proves as nothing else proves what the church holds up as patently obvious: humankind needs saving, and humankind will never save itself. Humankind doesn’t need to be helped; it doesn’t need to be inspired; it doesn’t need to be “topped up” with tonics intellectual or moral. Humankind needs to be saved.

To be sure, on Remembrance Day Sunday we are “remembering” in church. At the same time, the church knows that war isn’t an aspect of the kingdom of God or a herald of the kingdom of God. George Orwell was surely correct when he said, “War has never been right; war has never been sane; but sometimes war has been necessary.” In order to gain proper perspective on the matter we should invert Orwell’s aphorism: war has sometimes been necessary, but war has never been sane, never been right. Never been right in the sense of never been righteous. Righteousness pertains to the kingdom of God, and war is a contradiction of the kingdom of God.

How unrighteous is war? Who knew war better than Ulysses S. Grant, and who waged war more masterfully? When Ulysses S. Grant was leader of the Union forces during the War of the Great Rebellion (its official title in the U.S.A.) Grant used to say, “The purpose of war (the purpose of the war he was waging) is to end war. Then war should be ended as quickly as possible. War is ended fastest when war is waged against civilians. Governments surrender much faster when their civilians are being slain. Therefore always endeavour to wage war against civilians.” War, however necessary, has never been right, righteous. Only the kingdom of God knows righteousness.

Then the church’s responsibility, especially on Remembrance Day, is to exalt the triumph of the Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. Our Lord has been raised from the dead; not merely raised from death, he’s been raised beyond death, beyond the reach of death. The powers of evil that overtook him once can never overtake him again. Raised from the dead and raised beyond death, he now bestrides the world as the guarantee of that new creation in which, says Peter, righteousness dwells. (2 Peter 3:13)

Unquestionably evil afflicts God’s creation at this moment. Then is evil to distort and disfigure forever what God created out of his goodness and pronounced good? Is evil to linger so long as slowly but surely to gain the upper hand and thereby submerge even the residual goodness of the creation? No! Our Lord has been raised from the dead. His victory can never be overturned. God’s decisive intervention has already occurred. The struggle between the righteousness of God’s kingdom and the unrighteousness of a fallen world is a struggle whose outcome can never be in doubt. Because of our Lord’s victory we who are called to resist evil can never be involved in a losing cause. In resisting evil, rather, we are bearing witness to that triumph whose irreversibility renders our resistance fruitful.

Yet we must be sure to understand that resistance to evil is more than mere defiance of evil. Defiance of evil is certainly necessary; yet defiance of evil is never sufficient. Defiance of evil leaves us locked in a stalemate, with evil always setting the agenda. Defiance of evil, then is essentially negative. Resistance to evil, on the other hand, is essentially positive. Positively, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, we are to “go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” (Isaiah 2:1-4)

For the Hebrew mind “mountain” always has to do with revelation, and revelation is God’s gift of himself accompanied by the illumination of his gift. “House of God” has to do with the venue of worship. The God who longs to give himself to us is apprehended – that is, both understood and grasped — only as he is worshipped. It is only as we worship that we know ourselves the recipients of God’s gift, find ourselves illumined as to the meaning of this gift, learn the ways of God and therefore, ultimately, walk in God’s paths.

Resistance to evil, essentially positive whereas defiance of evil (admittedly necessary) is only negative; resistance to evil always entails peacemaking. Here we should note carefully the difference between peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacekeeping (once again necessary in our world) presupposes the capacity to wage war. All peacekeepers are armed. This point is surely significant: all peacekeepers are armed. In other words, peace is kept only as the threat of non-peace is a real threat. Peacemaking, however, is different. Peacemaking, so blessed that Jesus pronounces peacemakers “sons (daughters) of God”, those who mirror God’s nature; peacemaking has to do with shalom, and shalom is a synonym for salvation. God has made provision for us in the cross, his characteristic deed of sin-absorbing self-renunciation. We can make peace only as we “go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob”, and there “learn God’s ways and walk in his paths.” It’s plain that God’s way is the way of the cross; it’s plain that to walk in God’s paths is to walk the way of the crucified.

Ascending the mount of the Lord, worshipping in the house of the God of Jacob and learning his ways; all of this exists for one thing only: that we might walk in his paths. Walking in his paths happens to be most difficult of all. Ascending, worshipping, learning: all of this is easy compared to walking, for that walking which is the closest following of our Lord always entails crossbearing. Peacemaking, then, is every bit as arduous and dangerous as warwaging. Peacemaking entails as much hardship, discipline, self-renunciation – sacrifice – as warwaging.

Therefore we must always support those who pursue peace. We must never think that warriors are virile while peacemakers are “pantywaists.” We must never think that peacekeeping, necessary to be sure, is more important than peacemaking. We must always thank God for peacemaking wherever it occurs on however small or large a scale. The resurrection of our Lord from the dead (which resurrection is irreversible) means that the self-renunciation of peacemakers is never finally futile. Peacemaking, on whatever scale, is ultimately an anticipation of that God-appointed day, itself irreversible, when, in the words of the prophet Micah, all

shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4:4)

Victor Shepherd
November 1998