Sunday, August 31, 2025
READINGS and Message
PSALM 81:1, 10-16
As we listen to the words from Psalm 81, we also need to listen to ourselves…when we feel alienated from other people or from God, we end up with complex feelings, mixed memories, and conflicting emotions often dominate…external events and internal realities can play havoc with our perspectives…it’s wise to realize that in our faith journeys that we can become ‘oriented’ or ‘disoriented’…and this passage reflects orientation and disorientation or in other words ‘best self’ or ‘worst self’…so Psalm 81 gives us important clues for a mature faith – seek those sacred memories when you were totally oriented…
HEBREWS 13:1-3, 5-8, 15-16
So, our second reading from Hebrews, the writer sums it all up… “Let mutual love continue”…and then the writer offers some closing thoughts on what that means…and I’ve always loved that one line of showing hospitality to strangers in that you might have been entertaining angels without even knowing it…and despite the recurring theme of which is in this passage, most of us are resistant or hesitant to living these themes out…so…Hebrews, parts of chapter 13…
LUKE 14:1, 7-14
There’s one line here, in this Gospel passage of Luke, which totally resonates with me… “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted”…it kind of gives me an idea of some of our world leaders in these times…if we each lived more with ‘grace’, then I believe our world would be much more peaceful and much more inclined to have meaningful dialogue that would strengthen ties of culture, of race, of diversity and bring us to that point of ‘shalom’…
“WHAT IS IT TO BE PURE OF HEART?”
To share with you one of my personal thoughts on this day, I focus on the eighth verse of the Beatitudes…and I focus on this one because I can associate really well with the others but this one gives me a bit of trouble… “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”…pure in heart…this one gives me a little trouble in that I feel that my heart is not always pure and I know that when I stray from this so-called, purity of heart, God seems very distant…can you resonate with this?...yeah, I thought some of you would…
It’s not simple to be goodness 24/7…what is it to be pure in heart in the face of our own fears of downward mobility as the aging process starts to take over?...what is it to be pure in heart when those instances happen to us of our pride being battered by outside forces?...tough questions when these emotions take over from our somewhat, happy, normal lives…and I’m going to share with you an incident or two that has happened to me over these years where my ‘pureness of heart’ became a little tarnished or a wee bit distorted…
When I was a student minister, living and serving in Elk Point, Alberta, one of my many functions, which are the same here, was to do monthly services at the Lodge and at the Extended Care…many of those in the Extended Care, as most of us know, are residents who are there for a reason – they need more specialized care…and one of the debilitating diseases or symptoms that many of these folks have, is Alzheimer’s…a terrible breaking down of the human spirit…and in my Pastoral Care courses taken in Winnipeg and Saskatoon and outside of Regina, we, as student ministers, had been taught how to deal in ‘reality therapy’… this may be unknown to many of you but in reality therapy the therapist, or myself, would do every possible to drag a demented, deluded, or simply confused person back into reality…many of the folks in the Extended Care didn’t know their names, where they lived, or very much about the facts of their lives…so, it was taught to me that with my interaction with the residents, that I keep driving them back into some sort of reality…every time a nurse visited, or someone might have brought a tray of food in, or some prescriptions were being supplied, or someone came into the area that I knew, I would speak, in a fairly louder sort of voice, “Good Morning Bev or Linda or whoever it was…can you tell me what day it is?...who is the present Premier of Alberta?...where do we live right now?”…this seemed to work well with some of the folk because some of them had been victims of well-meaning relatives and friends who, when that person became confused, played along with them and in turn, made them more confused…and I was dedicated to this ‘reality therapy’ thing…I’d walk into some of the residents rooms and ask questions like, “Mrs. Smith…how many children do you have?...or who’s the mayor of Elk Point?...what is your room number?”…questions along this line…however, after many months of doing this, I lost faith in it…and this is what happened, in fact two instances…an older woman, one of the residents, one day said to me in a fairly loud voice, “You’ve gotta be 50 years younger than me and if you’re so damned interested in who the mayor of Elk Point is, why don’t you find out for yourself and quit bothering me?”…
A month later, another older woman said to me. “I’m 92 years old…I feel that, well, the location of this building, the name of this province, and even the day of the week are completely irrelevant to me.”…
And I could see these two people’s points….they weren’t living in a state of perpetual ‘unreality’…it was rather that they lived in a different one than mine…I had been taught that the ‘reality therapy’ assumed that we already knew what was real…that reality was fixed, final, and an uncontested fact…and trying to live a life in and around trying to be one who practiced ‘pure of heart’ got me in a little trouble….and isn’t this always the way?....when we try and do our best and what is pleasing to God, society can turn around on us and make all of our good intentions seem like nothing…some even are put onto a cross and suffer the worst pain possible…someone told me one day, “I think sometimes the non-violent way of Jesus makes sense, but it doesn’t really match up with the real world.”…and this is our most important function in life – to battle against what some may call the ‘real world’…to continually strive to lead a life with pureness of heart…this will change the world… this will change the tides of time and may even move us closer to the reality of the kingdom of God…
Jesus, the teacher, sits down with all of those of us who suffer, from time to time with dementia in its worst form…or the un-pureness of heart… and he conducts reality therapy upon us…the teacher asks us, “What day is it?...and we say Sunday – the day of rest and of being in community…and the next question, “Who are you?”…and I hope that your answer is that you are a beloved child of God who, little by little, is becoming the person God created you to be…in pureness of heart…
Thanks be to God!...