1) Blessed are those who are too tired, too busy, too distracted to spend an hour once a week with their fellow Christians – they are my best workers.

2) Blessed are those Christians who wait to be asked and expect to be thanked – I can use them.

3) Blessed are the touchy who stop going to Church – they are my missionaries.

4) Blessed are the trouble makers – they shall be called my children.

5) Blessed are the complainers – I’m all ears to them.

6) Blessed are those who are bored with the minister’s mannerisms and mistakes –for they get nothing out of his sermons. (This is particularly important!)

7) Blessed is the Church member who expects to be invited to his own Church – for he is a part of the problem instead of the solution.

8) Blessed are those who gossip – for they shall cause strife and divisions that please me.

9) Blessed are those who are easily offended – for they will soon get angry and quit.

10) Blessed are those who do not give their offering to carry on God’s work – for they are my helpers.

11) Blessed is he who professes to love God but hates his brother and sister – for he shall be with me forever.

12) Blessed are you who, when you read this think it is about other people and not yourself – I’ve got you too!

I like that a lot! Yeah!

We’ve been speaking about these 12 steps of healing so that we might never live up to those Devil’s Beautitudes and we’ve talked about the 12 Steps not only from a personal vantage point but also from a geopolitical vantage point. That is to say that we see these 12 Steps bringing about healing not just for individuals but also for nation states.

I’ve been doing pre marriage classes lately. There seem to be a lot of marriages happening both in this place and around this place. How glorious is that! And I’m also doing a series on the radio show about love. The topic is, "How to make love last" and the subsidiary topic, "Should we make love last?" and then last week I did one on, "What is love?" I invited a Buddhist friend to come on the show and to get their viewpoint on, "What is it that we talk about when we talk about love?"

And to repeat myself because it bears repeating, I always say to our pre marriage couples that love is a choice. Now, by that I mean, it’s not like Hollywood love, as the Buddhist described it, "That pink fog."

Love is not "Some enchanted evening you will meet a stranger across a crowded room." That is not what love is. That maybe how love starts but that is not what love is. Love is when all of that wears off, whenever that happens in your marriages or your relationships with friends, family and congregants.,When it all wears off and that person you see sitting across from you at the table in the morning has bad habits, you know, butters their bread the wrong way, irritates the heck out of you, didn’t do what you asked them to do the day before. When you’re stressed and you look at them and you say to yourself, "How in the world did I ever put myself in a position to be sitting across the table from this strange being. I don’t even like them right now never mind love them. That when you ‘choose’ love.

Because the Buddhist said it best, the person sitting across the table from you or next to you in the pew or around the table at the council meeting from you or on the other end of the email or on the phone or wherever you find yourself at work or at play, when they bug you the most, take a very deep breath and assume something. Assume something. Try this experiment. Assume you are the person who’s got it all wrong. Just assume that they are perfection on earth. That God has sent them into your lives for a reason and only them. It could only be them who’s sitting across from you or wherever. That they’ve been sent to you as an emissary from God with a particular message to you and the only way you’ll hear it is by reconfiguring them in your mind as that, this angel from God. The first thing you’ve got to admit to yourself is oh boy, am I messed up. That I could see this angel from God as anything less than in shimmering robes and beauty. Boy, where did I go astray?

It ain’t easy. I stressed it because it’s so unnatural. Of course the first thing that came into my head, the first thing is "Yeah but." You know the ‘yeah but’. What about the ones who really mean to do you wrong, what about those who really oppress you, what about injustice? There’s so much injustice in this world. What about struggling against injustice? What about those who really mean to do you harm? What about those who really oppress you? There’s always someone trying to hurt you and me. It’s true. What about them? How do we confront them? How do we stop it if it’s always our fault? And again, I harken back to my Buddhist guest who said loving someone doesn’t mean that you are a doormat. In fact it is the only place from which to do social justice. It is the only place to stand up for the oppressed. It is the only place to start to work for peace and forgiveness, hope and joy and love. It is the only place to start to do that from unless you want the same results that we’ve always had as a human race. The same results that we’ve had as a human race are the results that happened in Russia, are the results that happened in Iraq and happen as we speak. The same results that always happen, that happen in the middle east. It’s all about standing up for justice but not starting from ‘that place’.

Jesus talks about the foundation of our faith and that’s right here. The foundation of our faith is the voice within you that says, "My God, my God, forgive me.I have sinned so long.I have seen another of your children as if they were the enemy and at the very least I have seen them as if they weren’t a messenger from Heaven to me. I have committed this most grievous of sins. Please forgive me…And now, what was it you were saying again? Did you want another piece of toast honey?"

So that line from Blake, that beautiful line. "Thruout all eternity. I will forgive you and you will forgive me." That’s a good definition of love.

So here we have Jesus, angry, losing it, the cranky mother in the mall yanking on the disciples’ arms. You know they’re saying, "But Paul got a Barbie!" And James is saying, "No, John got the Malibu Barbie! Can’t I get one?" And Jesus is saying, "You’re all wrong!" "You’re all wrong"! "Start here (points at self) start here to be the change you want to see in the world." Said Gandhi. Start here to fashion the people in our lives as gifts from an all powerful, all loving God who has gifted us with this cantankerous, strange, other being who is also fearsomely and wonderfully made and see in them as if for the very first time, the face of God to us, the face of Christ to us.

We’re attempting to be welcoming I this congregation and as people come back after the summer holidays we’re going to have welcoming ministers. They will have tags around their necks which say, "Hi, I’m a welcoming minister." And you know the first thing that I think about when I think about that is this old is, "Oh no, this is going to be those people that jump all over you when you walk in the door, that force you back to coffee hour, just to get them on PAR, trying to fenagle them into being part of the congregation, knocks on their doors with tracts…no!" The reason we want to be welcoming as congregants and as Church to new people in our midst is because the reason we gather here is not to hear whatever I have to say or to sing hymns or even to pray. You know we can do those things other places. The reason we gather here is to wait. We are waiting for the Messiah to walk through the door and we do not know what the Messiah will look like this time. We don’t know if they’ll be addicted to crack. We don’t know if they’ll be three years old. We don’t know if they’ll be eighty three years old. We don’t know if they’ll be female or male, gay or straight, black or white. We don’t know but we do know that they’re not here yet. They’ll be walking into this place at some point is guaranteed.

We need to welcome people to find out about this Messiah. Is it you? That is the first question. It would be a nice question to be asked walking into a Church. "Are you the Messiah?" Great question to ask. Some might say yes! But also to welcome them because they have something to teach us. We need to know their story so that we can make it part of our story. It’s because we need something not because they need something. And the something that we need is embodied in them.

So enough said. We are a community who waits and trusts me the Messiah who walks in will be the one that you think is least likely to be the Messiah. Someone in a class at Emmanuel was asking about this Church when I went to speak there on the general topic of inclusion and how inclusive we are…blah, blah, blah. I said, "Yes we are. Anyone can come and we don’t care who you are or what you look like but I said you know what would be the real test for our Church to be welcoming?" Well in those days it would be Mike Harris but right now it would be, say, Dalton McGuinty, Paul Martin walked in or somebody walked in wearing a suit and a tie with conservative views and a conservative outlook. It would be if someone came into this Church and was homophobic or racist. It would be if someone walked in who was sexist, appalled that there was this weird chick up there. Those would be the test of our inclusivity and our love and our welcoming. Would we welcome them?

Let us pray together. Dearest God, every moment of every day we are called upon to look upon our own actions and our own words and do some accounting. The very first words that we need to say to each other are always those two, "Forgive me." The very first thing we need to do for each other is to welcome and love each other. How often we fall short and yet with You O Lord, the impossible becomes possible. The miracle always happens. So, O God, we pray for just that miracle in our own lives that we might live out this call

In the name of the one that lived it out for us, Jesus Christ.

Amen