Personal Salvation with Rev. Don McLeod | October 17, 2021 | Hillhurst United Church

good morning and welcome to hillhurst united church my name is john pentland one of the ministers here at hillhurst and look what i look who i found anybody who knows anything about our sermon last week it was uh on the way and on the way i found don mccloud and i also found this laying there so i picked it up and i'm taking it off and i'm going to stretch this out so dawn can be here don mcleod has been in our congregation for a number of years stepped in for a short-term piece of work that turned into a long piece term piece of work and we're glad you're back here don thank you yes i'm don mcleod not a minister of hillhurst united church but you are today but i'm happy to be here today absolutely so what have you been doing uh i have continued my consulting work still working with the national research program and uh supporting long-term care i'm actually the acting interim uh executive director for imagine citizens network if anybody wants to get this a shameless plug if anyone wants to get connected to healthcare and try to change it from a citizen perspective or a patient family perspective go to imaginecitizens.ca i'm also the day-to-day director of the wisdom center which um we just happen to be having a couple of programs coming up that i'll talk about so you better say something should i say something now i think you should okay well it just happens that next week diana butler bass uh a fine historian and theologian uh he's coming to well she's not coming virtually she's coming to the wisdom center so two online sessions wednesday and thursday evening you can go to see more about that on our events page of our website wisdomcenter.ca and she's great i mean i heard her at st lawrence when she was here last time she's written some great books uh that'll be an awesome opportunity so it's what nights again uh wednesday and thursday af uh evenings this coming week okay that's great we also moved to uh our third practice which is social justice we got a vote have you voted yet uh no i haven't i'm voting tomorrow voting tomorrow okay me too i will be uh voting ahead of time uh this is such an important spiritual thing our city is in need of great leadership we hope you'll take the time to figure out who works best for you both on your ward as and also as mayor also our anti-racism work continues the lunch and learn all of this you got to go to hillhurstunited.life that's where the risk value comes in it's risky to play around the computer and find your way we hope you'll find your way to nurture your soul life in this church so we're delighted don's going to share a sermon this morning challenge and hope uh as we live through this pandemic just a question how you been uh actually i've been well i believe yeah i've i've been well and i've stayed connected and uh to enough things that make a difference for my life that i'm grateful and feel kind of privileged that i'm doing okay well we're so glad you're with us and uh look forward to you checking in at hellhurst united.life welcome to hellhurst united church this morning in our community of faith we also as part of our tradition as a reminder that we are on treaty seven land and we celebrate and give thanks for the indigenous people and their stories their ways of walking and living on the land prior to us being here and their traditions their spiritual understanding helps us deepen our connection one to another as we seek to be treaty people and so we recognize the people of the siksika bakani kainai satina and stony dakota first nations recognizing that indigenous people have walked this land before us and their traditions inspire and deepen our own as we seek to live and honor a treaty people nation and so all of us are welcome to hellhurst united church good morning so excited to see you here this morning at hillhurst united church online hillary united church is an affirming community of faith and outside we have a banner that says whoever you are wherever you're at join us on the journey we're a community that values the sacred worth of everyone whatever your sexual orientation gender identity or expression health status age race nationality economic circumstance you belong here and we're so excited to worship with you this morning let [Music] where us and children tell how hard to forgive [Music] let oh build a house where prophets speak and words are strong and true [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] of jesus [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] through jesus is revealed in time and space as we share in christ the feast that frees us [Music] [Applause] [Music] and live the word they've known hear the outcast and the stranger the image of god's place [Music] [Applause] [Music] let us build a house [Music] tears prayers of faith [Music] as we gather uh in this service whether you're watching us on sunday morning or sunday afternoon or sometime midweek prayer is a pattern in our life it is a stopping it is a pausing it is an opening it's not about the right words it's about uh a pause to to be open to what's possible to let go of the things that hold us back and so i invite you now to pause with me both in word and in silence let us pray [Music] spirit of unity [Music] we confess our narrow perspective we confess our arrogance breathe fresh perspective breathe wider compassion deeper love wider wholeness as we gather we unclench our fists we open our hands and heart to the renewing power of your spirit in silence we continue our prayers we breathe and we gather our prayers as we sing together the lord's prayer [Music] our fathers [Music] on earth give us our sins as we forgive those who sing against us [Music] glory are yours [Music] one of the great gifts of the pause of the opening of the letting go is a fresh perspective a fresh look at ourselves our neighbor the creator the clearing of our eyes the opening of our heart and the enthusiasm that invites us to step one more step along the way and so as we journey trust that we leave the past behind and we step forward with god's love that lifts holds and invites us to new life we are loved forgiven and set free thanks be to god for this great good news amen if we were in our sanctuary we would pause at this time and invite you to greet your neighbors and the passing of the piece that's such an important part of our community to to move beyond our own pew to reach out a hand with an embrace to look someone else in the eye to acknowledge that we indeed are interconnected that we are indeed one the other thing that is so important in this service is an opportunity to give there needs to be a space and a place where you're invited to give of your time talent and treasure and so there's an opportunity on the screen now you'll see opportunities to give these gifts no matter the size tell us that this is your church that you value what we do seven days a week during this pandemic that we work hard and hope for the day when we'll all come back in these pews together but we invite you now to offer your gifts and so our offering will now be received i have called you by your name you are mine i have gifted you and all my promises are true you are mine [Music] name speak the word your soul can claim offer jesus [Music] choosing faith in spite of doubt holds [Music] i have given you my spirit as a make my wounded children go and tell my precious people they are [Music] so today we're going to hear from don he's going to talk a little bit about unity and we're going to be digging into a story from mark and it goes like this and one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another and seeing that he answered them well asked him which commandment is the most important of all and jesus answered the most important is hear o israel the lord our god the lord is one and you shall love the lord your god with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind and with all your strength and the second is this you shall love your neighbor as yourself there is no other commandment greater than these and the scribe said to him you are right teacher you have truly said that he is one and there is no other besides him and to love him with all the heart with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices and when jesus saw that he answered wisely he said to him you are not far from the kingdom of god and after that no one dared to ask him any more questions i'd like us to meditate for uh just a little bit to begin this sermon on the last two years or so of our life together and i mean all of us the whole human family these past two years obviously one of the first images you're going to think about is the fact that we've been living through a worldwide pandemic of the last year and a half or so so we have images from health care crisis and the grief that's felt around the world to the ringing of bells and the singing from balconies but there are so many images other images from the last couple of years fires and floods and extreme weather that continually appear as a clarion call to respect and renew our relationship with creation itself may we never forget those images of different colored children's shoes placed together on the steps of a building that was once a residential school a symbol of a canadian tragedy and a prophetic statement that surely now we are ready to walk the path of truth and reconciliation then there's the images of ongoing violence against women even though so many of us thought issues of women's rights and safety were won so long ago and signs of conflict everywhere of course civil wars and governments turning on their own people political rhetoric escalating to hate and becoming so divisive separating us by color or gender or income or culture there is a bleakness to all of this i recognize and it's probably not the greatest way to start a sermon on the one hand we can't help but be overwhelmed by the amount of grief and anxiety and to live with a sense of despair given what we've lived through these past two years that there is so much division and disruption and we are wrestling with so many complex challenges where will we ever find the unity we need to overcome to transform our current reality and yet underneath the surface working away there can also be seen or sensed a slow but sure evolution of thinking a subtle opening [Music] to a new awareness a new consciousness of who we are as a human family and what our relationship is with each other and all living things as paul writes all of creation groans toward salvation parker palmer in a recent blog wrote of all the virtues hope is one of the most needed in our time when people ask me how i stay hopeful in an era of widespread darkness i simply answer hope keeps me alive and creatively engaged with the world when privileged people like me choose hopelessness over hope it's not a reflection of the state of the world it's a reflection of the state of our souls many years ago in the 1960s the writer and activist james baldwin gave a speech and that speech surfaced a few years ago in a documentary released entitled i'm not your negro uh a documentary by a director raeu peck who envisions the book that baldwin was working on and never published when he died the book was to be a revolutionary personal account of the lies and success of assassinations of three of his close friends uh and social activists medgar evans malcolm x and martin luther king jr the result of this radical examination of race in america using uses baldwin's original words all the way through so i want you to listen to just a very short clip from a speech that baldwin gave in the 1960s about what was then termed as the race problem forget the negro problem don't write any voting acts we had that's called the 15th amendment you're under civil rights 1964 what you had to look at is what is happening in this country and what is really happening is that brother has murdered brother knowing it was his brother white men of negroes knowing them to be their sons white women have had negroes burned knowing love us it is not a racial problem it's a problem whether or not you're willing to look at your life and be responsible for it and then begin to change it that great western house i come from is one house and i'm one of the children of that house simply i'm the most despised child of that house and it is because the american people are unable to face the fact that in fact i am flesh out their flesh bone of their bone created by them my blood my father's blood is in that soil what a courageous and prophetic vision that emerges from baldwin's experience a vision of our unity as a human family even in the deep shadows in which he lived this vision arises not so much from faith for baldwin but rather from living in to his own humanness it is this recognition of unity even in the midst of tragic division that i want to focus on today this vision this alternative universal or cosmic story that baldwin's pointing to it aligns very closely to the teachings of jesus perhaps more closely than most christians would want to acknowledge cynthia burzeau in her book the wisdom jesus explores the idea of unity or oneness that jesus was teaching she suggests when jesus talks about oneness he's not speaking about an eastern sense of the equivalency of all being such that i am in and of myself divine rather what he has in mind is a complete mutual indwelling i am in god god is in you you are in god and we are in each other maybe the most beautiful symbol he gives us is where he says i am the vine and you are the branches abide in me and i in you and then later he goes on to say in the gospel of john the father and i are one and of course cynthia brazil reminds us that this is a statement so blasphemous to jewish ears that it almost gets jesus stoned but it's important to see that jesus does not see this unity with the divine as an exclusive privilege but as something shared by all human beings there is no separation between humans and god because of this mutual interbeing this inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine love so we flow into the divine just as much as the divine flows into us because it's the very nature of love to flow the whole and the part live together in mutual loving recep reciprocity each belonging to the other and dependent on the other to show forth the fullness of love that's jesus vision of no separation between the human and divine and no separation then between human and human which is an equally powerful notion one of the most familiar teachings that we heard read today is this teaching to love your neighbor as yourself but we must always hear this wrong in that we hear love your neighbor as much as yourself and of course the next logical question then becomes how can i love innate my neighbor until i love myself but if you listen closely to jesus there is no as much as in his teaching it's just love your neighbor as yourself as the continuation of your very own being it's a complete seeing that your neighbor is you so two things about all of this one is there is an emerging cosmic story that every once in a while uh the human family needs to shift our cosmic story our universal story the way we understand ourselves and the world and our role in it and that shift is happening now i believe underneath the surface we are opening to a new understanding of consciousness itself so the second point i'd like to make about all this is that some things must be let go of if we were going to move into this new universal story that is emerging and one thing that i think is critical for christians to let go of is something that's been so central to the christian story all these centuries when you hear me say this you will either it will either strike you as being patently obvious or something rather shocking and although i've long held this perspective in my own inner reality i'm not so sure i've actually said it in a sermon but here goes the one thing that i think christians need to let go of probably more than anything else if we were going to move into this new universal story and really deeply not only understand but embody the unity that god intended for us and for the whole human family and for all living things the one thing we need to let go of is our idea of personal salvation i believe there is no such thing as personal salvation the whole concept of a private or personal salvation is actually divisive and in many ways is christianity's devastating contribution to the experience of separation and divisiveness in the human family today how many of the current champions of intolerance and exclusion today also would boldly claim that they are born again that they have a personal relationship with jesus that they are personally saved too many i think moving away from the idea of personal salvation is part of the shift both of the universal story that we've been telling for all these centuries a shift away but also clearly it brings a different vision for what it means to be human and what the spiritual path is all about let's go back to james baldwin quote baldwin's quote at the end of his talk that great western house that i come from is one house and i'm of the children of that house it's simply that i'm the most despised of that house it's the fact that the american people are unable to face that fact but i am flesh of their flesh bone of their bone created by them in other words disunity and intolerance division it's not a black problem it's not an indigenous problem it's not a woman problem it's not a queer or lgbtqai plus problem the reality is that this house we all come from is one house and we are each children of that one house and some of us just happen to be the most despised of that house but that does not change the fact that we are all flesh of the one flesh bone of the one bone created by the one unity itself when you hear that and you reflect on all the division the deeply rooted prejudice the othering and the despising of difference that still reigns in our time as it has throughout history how can we dare think or worse cling to the outdated notion that some individuals believing the right thing or taking the correct steps can actually experience personal salvation outside of the whole what's the highest measure of spiritual attainment in the christian gospel isn't it the capacity to love one's neighbor as oneself the whole notion of individual salvation eventually proves to be an oxymoron in a love-based model everybody's spiritual destiny is extricably bound to everyone else's spiritual destiny the word salvation itself if you go back to the original latin word a root means solve literally means wholeness and it's only in the whole that wholeness can be found again to go back to paul's words all creation groans toward this salvation not only for some select people or the right ethnic group or the chosen religious tribe all creation groans toward this salvation and in the end isn't wholeness the only salvation that really matters jesus came as a teacher a prophet sent to awaken us to a new consciousness a new universal story i suggest it's time we claim this new story in all its radicalness for surely it is the source of hope for us in days like this and the days to come hope that keeps us alive and creatively engaged with the world may that be so among us amen [Music] so we've heard don talk about wholeness about unity and this song kept popping up to me there's a it's a beautiful song by brandy carlisle called the story and the thing is where we get to know each other where we move past the walls figuratively or literally that we build between each other how we get past those is through story through narrative through knowing each other through our experiences and i think this song tells that so beautifully so i just want to invite you to interact with this however you feel comfortable if you want to listen however whatever it brings to you just hold some space for that all of these lines across my face tell you the story of who i am so many stories of where i've been and how i got to where i am [Music] but these stories don't mean anything when you got no one to tell them to it's true i was made for you i climbed and crossed the mountaintops swimming across the ocean blue i crossed all the lines and i broke all the rules baby i broke them all for you because even when i was flat broke you made me feel like a million bucks you do cause i was made for you [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you see the smile that's on my mouth [Music] it's hiding the words that don't come out all of my friends who think i'm blessed they don't know my head's a mess no they don't know who i really am they don't know what i've been through like you do [Music] i was made for you [Music] and all of these lines across my face tell you the story of who i am so many stories of where i've been and how i got to where i am but these stories don't mean anything if you got no one to tell them to it's true i was made for you cause these stories don't mean anything if you've got no one to tell them it's true i was made for you we give thanks uh for dawn mcleod's uh sermon today and his presence in our city and in our church community here stepping back to share uh good news with us you know the reminder that the personal salvation is a myth and that actually it's corporate there is only one salvation and it is indeed all of us and we hearken back to the words of jesus to love our neighbor as our self this is a call to remember that we are interconnected we are made whole by the power of the spirit and it is all of us so as we journey this week will you ponder and wonder about these words and take time to look at the stranger in your meds the people that will cross your path and see them as yourself and love them as yourself so go this day in the name of the father son and holy spirit one god mother of us all [Music] that amen when everything is beautiful it's just another ordinary [Applause] miracle today sky knows when it's time to snow don't need to teach a sea to grow it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] open up and find a way to give somebody [Music] it's just another ordinary [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's just another ordinary miracles today [Applause] when you wake up every day please don't throw your dreams away hold them close to your heart [Music] of the ordinary miracles [Music] do you wanna see a miracle [Music] it seems so exceptional that things just work out after all it's just [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle today for the beauty of the earth for the glory of the skies for the lovers [Music] moon and stars [Music] the joy of human love brother sister parent child friends on earth thoughts [Music] this is [Music] this [Music] it's not that unusual when everything is beautiful it's just another ordinary miracle today the sky knows when it's time to snow don't need to teach a sea to grow it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] open up and find a way to give somebody [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle [Applause] [Music] it's just another ordinary [Music] [Applause] [Music] please don't throw your dreams away hold them close to your cause we're all a part of the ordinary miracle [Music] [Applause] do you wanna see a miracle [Music] it seems so exceptional that things just work out after all it's just another ordinary miracle today it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] for the beauty of the earth for the glory of the skies for [Music] grateful praise [Music] for the joy of human love brother sister parent child friends on earth [Music] human and divine [Music] this [Music] it's not that unusual when everything is beautiful it's just another ordinary miracle today the sky knows when it's time to snow don't need to teach a sea to grow it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] open up and find a way to give somebody [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle [Applause] [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle today [Applause] when you wake up every day please don't throw your dreams away hold them close to your heart cause we're all a part of the ordinary miracles [Music] do you wanna see a miracle [Music] it seems so exceptional that things just work out after all it's just another ordinary miracle today it's just another ordinary miracle today [Music] it's just another ordinary miracle today

Channel: Hillhurst United Church

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Keywords: Hillhurst United Church, Calgary Church, Welcoming Church, Affirming, Church, Gay Church, Calgary NW church, Kensington Church, LGBTQ, LGBT, John Pentland, Anne Yates-Laberge, United Church of Canada, livestream church, canada, alberta, god, jesus, spirituality, social justice, feminist, feminism church, gender, gender equality, progressive, progressive church, liberal church, mainline church, liberal, mainline, brian mclaren, richard rhor, theology, bible, spiritual church

Id: zmpvGRUpdIw

Length: 49min 56sec (2996 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021