Drenched to the Bone
I am Reverend Breanne Swan, and this is Sermons from the East End for Tuesday, February 20th, 2024. Hello, and welcome back after a much longer absence than I had ever intended. I may not have been publishing our sermons via various podcasting platforms, but we have been very, very busy, particularly in our community and justice ministries at East End United. Of particular note, this fall, East End United hosted 30 asylum seekers in the basement of our Eastminster campus, 247. This was a monumental effort, and we could never have done it without the help of our neighbors in the East End of Toronto, our United Church friends, as well as our ecumenical and interfaith partners.
Speaker 1:Right now, we find ourselves within the 1st week of Lent, a time to reflect on those ways we find ourselves separated from god, as well as what we need to change in our lives in order to move towards reconciliation with the divine. We begin our Lenten journey with an old, familiar story, or at least the end of an old familiar story: God sending the rainbow and making a covenant with Noah. Genesis chapter 9 verses 8 through 17, from the new revised standard version. Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, as for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came on the ark. I establish my covenant with you that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the Earth.
Speaker 1:God said, this is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations. I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you, and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it, and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. God said to Noah, this is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.
Speaker 1:For anybody who has been hanging around a church for any amount of time, As I said earlier, this is a familiar story. The conclusion of the story of Noah and the ark is about as Sunday school greatest hits as one can get. Noah and the Ark is an old, old myth, based upon other old, old myths coming out of Mesopotamia. And this particular flood story emerged in its current form approximately 5 and a half centuries before the birth of Christ. God sending the waters, leading to the utter decimation of all fleshly creation was an incredibly violent act.
Speaker 1:And I like to think I like to think that this covenant is God changing their mind. That perhaps God eventually came to the conclusion that killing everything and everybody just caused them way too much sorrow and heartbreak, and that God's own heart was softened enough to consider that there must be another way. To be clear, describing the story as myth is not synonymous with saying it is untrue because this story has many truths. We can take this story seriously without taking it literally. And eventually claimed by Christians, this story has been taken very, very seriously, And it is because of this story that for many generations, the rainbow has been a symbol of covenant and promise, Specifically, God's promise to care for and look after all of us, and to never again be so freaking angry that they decide to kill everybody and everything without discretion.
Speaker 1:To never again choose this level of violence against their people. And it is also why, especially growing up as a child in the nineties, that churches had rainbows plastered all over the place. The United Church was all about the rainbows, and it still is in most places all about the rainbows, but perhaps for different reasons, which I will get into in a little while. But these rainbows in the church of my youth symbolized covenant and promise. My very favorite picture of myself as a child, which I will absolutely post in the show notes because I just love it so much, was taken when I was 3 years old.
Speaker 1:I was at some sort of fair with my aunt and my mother, and my aunt took me to get my face painted. And in the photo, I'm sitting beside her with a dove painted on my forehead and 2 rainbows, 1 on each cheek. I was too young to remember this day, but I am told that I refused to wash my face before going to bed because I wanted to keep these rainbows forever. These rainbows were a key feature of my Sunday school experience. Now a mostly unrelated fixture in my life growing up was the eerie landscape of conservative talk radio.
Speaker 1:And I can honestly say that I never in my life thought that I would be speaking about these 2 very different experiences in the same reflection, but here we are. My father always had talk 6 40 and CFRB playing as he was driving. And there are a couple of people I felt like I practically knew from listening to them and their voices so much. One of these people was Bill Carroll and the other was Michael Coran. Now for those of you who might not know who Michael Coran is, he was arguably one of the most recognized commentators, speakers, and columnists within Catholic and conservative media in Canada.
Speaker 1:My father listened to Michael Koren on the radio, but he also watched his show every single night on Crossroads Television station. It's worth noting that my father was not a Christian nor did he claim to have any spiritual identity whatsoever. But Michael Corin said all the things my dad felt about the world, minus the God part. Coran also represented social conservatives in Canadian media, and those are my father's people. I always felt Corin was more dangerous than people like, say, Tucker Carlson or Ezra Levant because he was so well spoken.
Speaker 1:He seemed so reasonable, and as far as I can remember, never personally attacked anybody, So he was harder to dismiss. And it was difficult for me to reconcile watching this guy who seemed like he'd be perfectly lovely in person with the things he was saying, because they were just so hurtful. One of Michael Koren's positions that I disagreed with most vehemently and believe me, I'd watched a lot of Michael Coran, so I had a lot of material to work with, was his stance on same sex marriage. Korn was a member of the Catholic church and towed his denomination's party line when it came to LGBTQ justice issues. But again, he never called anybody names.
Speaker 1:He was mostly polite yet very firm. But by his own account in more recent years, he emboldened those who were perhaps not as restrained to be more outward with their hatred. He wrote, he spoke, and people took his words and ran with them. He was a writer, a critic, and with that pen, he prophesied to a demographic yearning for the world to return to as they believed it once had been. But after moving out of my family home when I was 18, I had a lot more control over whose voice I listened to on the radio.
Speaker 1:And I was too poor for a television or cable, so that took care of that. But even if I had a television, I wouldn't have been watching Michael Corran. So every so often, he would pop up in the news and I would shake my head a bit, and then I would forget about him again. Until a couple of years ago, when I saw a newspaper headline that said that Michael Coran had well, he changed his mind. So what happened?
Speaker 1:Well, this is his explanation in his own words. He says, I am a person of faith. I am a Christian, and I was increasingly uncomfortable with claiming to follow a man who was the personification of love, justice, and forgiveness. Tolerance, including not excluding, never judging and reconciling that with a stance I had, which was pretty judgmental. And I don't think that I was close to a breakdown, but I wasn't comfortable in my own skin.
Speaker 1:And it got to the point where I knew I had to make a decision. There is much more to Mr. Coran's story of changing his mind, which he details in his book called Epiphany. And after so many years of feeling hurt and frustration and even anger about so much of what this man had to say, I actually found myself standing in my kitchen, waving his book around in the air and moaning to my husband, oh my goodness, I cannot believe I am developing a soft spot for Michael Coran. My heart was softened to this man and his journey.
Speaker 1:And because as a writer and pundit, he was the voice of so much of the attitudes I had internalized and experienced as harmful while growing up, Corin's change of heart and my resulting change of heart has been a very powerful and moving experience. His book initiated for me a journey of understanding folks who thought and spoke like my father just a little bit better. So then I find myself coming back to the rainbow, a rainbow of covenants and promise. And now, also a symbol of affirmation for those of us in our community who are queer. It's interesting to me that the origins of the pride flag have nothing to do with God's promise to Noah.
Speaker 1:It was created separately by an individual artist with each color stripe representing a different aspect of human experience. And yet, here we are, a rainbow of covenant, a rainbow of affirmation. And then I find myself hoping that responsibility can be added into the mix. When God spoke to Noah and his family, promising to all of creation that never again would God send a flood to destroy everything, I'd like to think that covenant was a two way exchange. And that perhaps humanity's responsibility was to, well, try harder, lest we end up drenched to the bone, not through floodwaters, but drowning within our own sea of biases.
Speaker 1:Try harder to live good and decent lives, to live with respect in creation, to love and serve others. These all seem like really good themes as we journey into the Lenten season. Journeys of change are often lonely, wild, and usually longer than 40 days. There are questions of identity, safety, security, place in community. In the Christian narrative, God ultimately decides to enter into humanity with us through Jesus.
Speaker 1:After we've continued to blunder, perhaps God realizes some of us are the kind of learners for whom simply telling us how to live isn't enough. We need to be shown. Again and again, we need to be shown by somebody in whom we can see ourselves and see our own potential. For his part, Koren has taken it upon himself to reach out to LGBTQ plus rights groups and apologize. Taking responsibility to sit down with individuals and say, I am sorry that my words have hurt you.
Speaker 1:I am sorry that I have hurt you. And the reverend Michael Korn is now an Anglican priest in Burlington and a Christian socialist. So there you go. I have found my heart even more softened after watching Michael Coran being so open and unreserved about his coming to terms with the words he has said and the people he has affected. And with all of this deeply embedded into my mind and moving my heart and seeing how the Reverend Koren has taken responsibility to educate and make amends, I feel like I have my own responsibility now to examine my relationships to the people with whom I do not agree and consistently find myself at odds.
Speaker 1:These are often the people I was closest to in my formative years, and with them work more towards dialogue than simply dismissal. Because if the Reverend Coran can do it, maybe I can step down from my soapbox for a while and do it too. God had a change of heart. Michael Koren had a change of heart and even I had a change of heart because once again, here I am talking about Michael Coran in a way my teenage self would never have imagined in a 1000000 years, I would be. So I want to leave the last words of this reflection with Michael Koren because as we move even closer towards Jerusalem, where we will hear about everybody from the disciples, to the religious leadership, to the government, and to the crowds getting it so very wrong.
Speaker 1:It's nice to be reminded that there is always a way home. My interest as a Christian, says Coran, and particularly one who got things wrong for so long, is always going to be truth, love, compassion, and justice. May it be so. Amen. Free.
Speaker 1:To make your own choices and be redeemed. East End United Regional Ministry is committed to supporting our neighbors throughout the east end of Toronto. We run a weekly food bank market out of our Glen Roads campus on Gerrard Street, as well as out of the cold from our Eastminster campus on Danforth Avenue. We actively support refugees and asylum seekers, and are public, intentional, and explicit of our affirmation and advocacy for 2 spirited and LGBTQIA plus peoples. We gather for worship on-site and online Sunday mornings at our Eastminster campus, and Thursday evenings at our Glen Robes campus.
Speaker 1:We are a community working to figure out how to embody the words of Cornel West, who said justice is what love looks like in public. We don't always get it right, but we are committed to working for progress even as we acknowledge that we are a work in progress. If any of this sounds interesting, we would love to meet you. Feel free to send me, Reverend Breanne, an email, bswan@eastendunited.ca. I would love to connect over coffee, either in person or online.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this week's episode. We will be back next week as we wonder about Jesus' call to take up your cross. It's a little bit complicated. So until then, take care of yourselves and each other. We'll be back soon.
Speaker 1:East End United Regional Ministry is an affirming community of faith within The United Church of Canada. You can learn more about our community, including our many outreach programs, by going to www.eastandunited.
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