Rev. Brenna's Blog

Rev. Brenna's Blog


By Rev. Brenna 08 Nov, 2018
Please note, the views I express here are my own from my own experiences, and don't necessarily reflect those of all church members. Last week, my spouse and I did a big thing - we closed on a house and moved into it. We’re officially homeowners. After years of being assigned housing at school or through ministry positions, and years of sometimes tense relations with landlords, we now have our own home - a home we can do what we like to, a home we can make our own. This step, like any big life decision, hasn’t come without its internal wrestling, however. We live in a society that idealizes huge houses with tons of space, which is often bad for the environment and bad for communities. Internally, they must be shiny and up to date, which can mean wasting materials that are working just fine. In the GTA where we live, housing prices rise while income has not risen at nearly the same rate meaning the system keeps people in debt. Most municipalities in the area are woefully under-serving low income families in terms of affordable housing. All of this leading us to wonder over the last year or so, do we even want to participate in this system? What are the real benefits and how much are we just experiencing the pressure, which many young adults feel that somehow you’re not a “real” adult until you own your own home? Well, we obviously went through with it - for all the usual reasons. It’s an important investment. We want to be able to create our own space, and have rooms and appliances that suit our needs. We want to truly invest in our community and neighbourhood. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. But as we unpacked boxes this weekend, I thought about the notions of home that we have and all those who are without a home. As caravans of thousands of migrants move through Central America and Mexico seeking safety and asylum in a new home, I remembered again the privilege it is to be able to live in a space that is safe, and to be able to call that space our own. As millions of people are displaced worldwide due to war and natural disaster, (not to mention those who are homeless right here in the GTA), there are many conversations being had around who has the right to make a home in certain places. While no one questioned our buying a house, I too, am an immigrant. While my situation in America wasn’t a dangerous one, I did come to Canada in 2011 because there was an opportunity here that wasn’t available in the US at the time. Not one person ever insinuated that I married my spouse because it was convenient for me, and so, no one has questioned the idea that we would buy a home and own property here. Just why we see some people as entitled to a safe home and others as not entitled is something we must grapple with in the Western world, and in the church - especially if our ancestors were people who also moved to new places seeking a better life. We should pay attention to the ways certain comments are coded in racial terms. For example, as a young, educated white woman who speaks English, I was seen as “ambitious” and “brave” for starting my career in a new country. No one accused me of “stealing” a job. Yet, people with different skin tones and languages can be seen as dangerous or hostile to the people already living there. The fact is, the world is getting smaller and much more global. My spouse grew up in a teeny town in Ontario with his four siblings. In our expanding family, two of us siblings in law are currently applying for Canadian citizenship, and our other sister-in-law is first generation Canadian. We are a fairly diverse bunch it turns out, and embody just in our family, that it is natural for human beings to move and set up home in the places that will give them the best chance at the best life. As Christians, it’s right that we have a bit of a tenuous relationship with the concept of home. Throughout scripture, we are reminded that our true home is with God, and that our homes here on earth are temporary. Far from home being something that is used for power or keeping others out, though, any home we have here should be for strengthening us to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. Our homes should radiate God’s love and be a little oasis, a glimpse of that forever home we aspire to. God’s people, too, have always been on the move - from the Israelites in the desert to Jesus’ disciples - we are a wandering people. So when we see people on the move, we might wonder, is something holy happening here? What is God trying to draw our attention to? Over and over, God reminds us we must love the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger because we have been those things too. As followers of Christ, we are to make home a possibility for all people - it’s not just a privilege for some. I am so proud of the work our church has done to resettle some refugees from the war in Syria. We also work locally to make home a reality for those who are housing insecure in Mississauga. Our church home, beautiful in diversity, and beautiful in all its imperfections, offers a glimpse of God’s home, God’s Kingdom, which is the ideal for which we strive. Especially as we approach this Advent and Christmas season, and we hear the ancient story again about a family without a place to stay, we pray that all our neighbours around the world would find a home, and we pray that our own homes would be places of peace and compassion and generosity.
By Rev. Brenna 19 Jul, 2018
Over the past few months, our church has been working on creating a new photo directory. This happens in most congregations every 5-10 years. Everyone says, "We should do a new directory," people mumble agreement, but no one wants to actually take on the work of phoning people, setting up appointments and communicating with the photographers. This time around, over the spring, thanks to some amazing volunteers, we finally got to work. The minister is always asked to write a message for the directory. I struggled with this because, frankly, a photo directory is such a unique thing, and feels old fashioned. I haven't been a part of any other group that does a photo directory - aside from schools, I suppose, which have something similar in terms of a yearbook. But that serves a different purpose. Yearbooks are for nostalgia - not for getting to know people. Ultimately, though, as I flip through the pages of what will now be known as the "old directory", I see the advantages of a bound book that holds faces and names. In our society where people are coming and going all the time, it feels so meaningful to literally hold our church family in my hands, to see their faces and say their names. And I wonder, even if we're not a part of this church or any church, how we might start to see the Divine in all faces we encounter -whether it's in "real life" or in some virtual way like social media. For more, read below the message that will be printed in our new directory. A Message from our Minister In a time when the church at large is changing in some very profound ways, we always try to remind ourselves that the church is people – not a building. The church is Christ’s body on earth – Christ’s hands, feet, heart and soul. In your hands, you hold a representation of that Body – a group of people brought together by the Spirit to love God and neighbour in this little corner of the world. While church directories might feel a bit antiquated in our modern age of social media and technology, this is actually a great resource for prayer and fellowship. Outside of trying to remember the name of that person we chatted with over coffee, we can also use this directory to occasionally turn the pages and pray for one another. We see the faces of those we know and love so well and offer a blessing for them, and we see the faces of those we don’t know and pray that we might grow in that relationship. As this directory is being developed in the spring of 2018, we are up to some new and exciting things at Erindale United, and have recently welcomed several new members into our midst. We know, though, that this directory will become outdated almost immediately. New people will join us and not be in the directory. Children will grow and leave us. Sadly, some of our saints will move on to life beyond death. Such is the normal progression of life. Still, if we find ourselves looking at this directory again several years from now, we might give thanks for the ways in which God is always moving ahead of us and guiding us forward. We give thanks for the Holy Spirit of wind and fire who is always changing and remolding, and we give thanks for Christ who makes all things new. We give thanks that even as our church and the world around us looks different year to year, God’s abundant love for us is unchanging and unceasing. As our United Church creed says, we are not alone. We live in God’s world. This directory is a testament to that simple and beautiful fact. Thanks be to God.
By Rev. Brenna 18 Apr, 2018
Because many couldn't safely make it to worship on April 15, I'm posting part of my planned message here. It is part two of a five part sermon that looks at the first letter of John in relation to our church mission statement: Erindale United Church is a people of God. We embrace, proclaim and practice the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We seek justice for all people, striving to become a loving, nurturing, and ministering community. Our texts for this day were: Luke 24:36-48 and 1 John 3:1-7. Embracing the Gospel As we move into this second week of a First John sermon series, I invite you to take a moment and reflect on this question: throughout your life, how have you known that you were loved? Whether it was the love of a parent, the love of a child, the love of your partner or spouse, the love of a friend, or even the love of a stranger - how have you really known you were loved, experienced and internalized that love? And, to complicate things, how would you explain that feeling to others? I can recall a moment when (my now spouse) Jordan and I were preparing to join our finances and create one household together. We sat down at the computer screen and pulled up some financial documents so I could show him my debt from graduate school. Now, compared to many people coming out of the US higher education system, my debt was small and manageable, but still, in a relationship, our finances can be an incredibly vulnerable area. So I braced myself a bit - as I revealed my debt to a person who had no debt and hadn’t chosen this particular debt and I explained, “Okay here is where a piece of our income will go every month,” - I braced myself waiting for some judgment and questioning. But instead, Jordan took all the information in, thought about it in his reflective, calm way, and said, “Well, I guess your debt is my debt now,” and these were some of the most romantic words I’ve ever heard. While we don’t think of finances as being particularly romantic, I knew how deeply I was loved in that moment, a moment when I could share something that was a bit shameful for me, and receive grace and understanding instead of judgment - a moment to really take in the fact that I didn’t have to face my financial challenges alone. Now, Jordan would roll his eyes to hear me say this, but it was, for me, a moment of fully experiencing God’s love in the form of my life partner, a moment of embracing and taking in what sacrificial love looks like. Still, communicating that feeling of being truly seen and known and loved for your whole self - it’s hard work. It’s one of the most challenging things I find in ministry is to explain in words an internal feeling that goes so far beyond words. And if it is hard to explain what it feels like to be loved by other people, it feels still more difficult to explain what it feels like to be loved by God. Yet, the resurrection, the Easter story, means just that: God loves us. If we had to boil it down to one sentence, the resurrection is a sign for us that, in spite of everything, in spite of the flaws of humanity, in spite of those things that are most shameful to us, those parts of ourselves we wish to keep hidden, God loves us. As John writes, see what love God has for us that we should be called children of God. But this message has always been hard to take in and to embrace. Our two readings point to how challenging it can be to hold onto those feelings of love, and really have God’s love be a part of our identity. In Luke’s gospel, the disciples are still trying to figure out all that has taken place, and as we talked about on Easter Sunday, fear and doubt are still part of the story. This section follows the Emmaus Road text where the risen Christ walks and talks for a time with two disciples outside the city of Jerusalem. They don’t recognize him until he breaks bread in front of them. After he disappears, they return to Jerusalem to tell the others, and in the middle of that conversation, risen Jesus pops in again, and they share this meal of fish together. It seems that, like me, the risen Christ is drawn to good food and good company. But Jesus can tell they are kind of freaked out by everything that is happening. “Why are you frightened and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” he asks them. Can’t they see that he is right there before them? God’s love, God’s power over death is standing right before them, and yet they are having a hard time embracing it. Decades later, John is trying to offer Christ’s peace to his people who still don’t fully understand what the resurrection means or looks like. He invites them to trust in the mystery saying that we don’t know what we will become, we don’t know exactly where this all is leading. We have seen glimpses of God’s love, like the disciples who see him before he moves on again, but we can’t see or understand the full picture of God’s love for us. We get these moments, but not the whole thing. Still, John says, we know something of God’s love, we see it, take it in and embrace it, whenever we we can act like Christ, whenever we can be righteous as Christ is righteous. We remember, here, John’s call to fellowship at the opening of the letter we read last week. We have unity with God and Christ, and our lives are to proclaim the love of the resurrected Christ in such a way that others are invited in. The theologian Miroslav Volf writes in Exclusion and Embrace, “Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a ‘foursome,’ as it were-- for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.” In other words, while the idea of embracing the Gospel, as our mission statement suggests we strive to do, seems solitary and personal, it actually should lead us to sharing and reflecting that love back out into our relationships, and should give others a glimpse of what the resurrected Christ’s love and peace look like. In times when we are closed off to others and not willing to share that generosity and love, I would suggest it’s because we haven’t actually fully embraced God’s love for us, we haven’t taken that in and allowed ourselves to be transformed if we’re not willing to let others into that unity with God. So in this Easter season, as we seek communion with Christ and with one another, we can acknowledge that fully understanding the scope of God’s love and what God is up to in the world is challenging, if not, impossible and sometimes startling. However, we can start with the people right in front of us. We can embrace the love offered to us by friends and family and partners and see it as a way of God embracing us. Strengthened by God’s loving embrace, we can’t help but share it with others. Let it be so. Amen.
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By Rev. Brenna 08 Nov, 2018
Please note, the views I express here are my own from my own experiences, and don't necessarily reflect those of all church members. Last week, my spouse and I did a big thing - we closed on a house and moved into it. We’re officially homeowners. After years of being assigned housing at school or through ministry positions, and years of sometimes tense relations with landlords, we now have our own home - a home we can do what we like to, a home we can make our own. This step, like any big life decision, hasn’t come without its internal wrestling, however. We live in a society that idealizes huge houses with tons of space, which is often bad for the environment and bad for communities. Internally, they must be shiny and up to date, which can mean wasting materials that are working just fine. In the GTA where we live, housing prices rise while income has not risen at nearly the same rate meaning the system keeps people in debt. Most municipalities in the area are woefully under-serving low income families in terms of affordable housing. All of this leading us to wonder over the last year or so, do we even want to participate in this system? What are the real benefits and how much are we just experiencing the pressure, which many young adults feel that somehow you’re not a “real” adult until you own your own home? Well, we obviously went through with it - for all the usual reasons. It’s an important investment. We want to be able to create our own space, and have rooms and appliances that suit our needs. We want to truly invest in our community and neighbourhood. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. But as we unpacked boxes this weekend, I thought about the notions of home that we have and all those who are without a home. As caravans of thousands of migrants move through Central America and Mexico seeking safety and asylum in a new home, I remembered again the privilege it is to be able to live in a space that is safe, and to be able to call that space our own. As millions of people are displaced worldwide due to war and natural disaster, (not to mention those who are homeless right here in the GTA), there are many conversations being had around who has the right to make a home in certain places. While no one questioned our buying a house, I too, am an immigrant. While my situation in America wasn’t a dangerous one, I did come to Canada in 2011 because there was an opportunity here that wasn’t available in the US at the time. Not one person ever insinuated that I married my spouse because it was convenient for me, and so, no one has questioned the idea that we would buy a home and own property here. Just why we see some people as entitled to a safe home and others as not entitled is something we must grapple with in the Western world, and in the church - especially if our ancestors were people who also moved to new places seeking a better life. We should pay attention to the ways certain comments are coded in racial terms. For example, as a young, educated white woman who speaks English, I was seen as “ambitious” and “brave” for starting my career in a new country. No one accused me of “stealing” a job. Yet, people with different skin tones and languages can be seen as dangerous or hostile to the people already living there. The fact is, the world is getting smaller and much more global. My spouse grew up in a teeny town in Ontario with his four siblings. In our expanding family, two of us siblings in law are currently applying for Canadian citizenship, and our other sister-in-law is first generation Canadian. We are a fairly diverse bunch it turns out, and embody just in our family, that it is natural for human beings to move and set up home in the places that will give them the best chance at the best life. As Christians, it’s right that we have a bit of a tenuous relationship with the concept of home. Throughout scripture, we are reminded that our true home is with God, and that our homes here on earth are temporary. Far from home being something that is used for power or keeping others out, though, any home we have here should be for strengthening us to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world. Our homes should radiate God’s love and be a little oasis, a glimpse of that forever home we aspire to. God’s people, too, have always been on the move - from the Israelites in the desert to Jesus’ disciples - we are a wandering people. So when we see people on the move, we might wonder, is something holy happening here? What is God trying to draw our attention to? Over and over, God reminds us we must love the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger because we have been those things too. As followers of Christ, we are to make home a possibility for all people - it’s not just a privilege for some. I am so proud of the work our church has done to resettle some refugees from the war in Syria. We also work locally to make home a reality for those who are housing insecure in Mississauga. Our church home, beautiful in diversity, and beautiful in all its imperfections, offers a glimpse of God’s home, God’s Kingdom, which is the ideal for which we strive. Especially as we approach this Advent and Christmas season, and we hear the ancient story again about a family without a place to stay, we pray that all our neighbours around the world would find a home, and we pray that our own homes would be places of peace and compassion and generosity.
By Rev. Brenna 19 Jul, 2018
Over the past few months, our church has been working on creating a new photo directory. This happens in most congregations every 5-10 years. Everyone says, "We should do a new directory," people mumble agreement, but no one wants to actually take on the work of phoning people, setting up appointments and communicating with the photographers. This time around, over the spring, thanks to some amazing volunteers, we finally got to work. The minister is always asked to write a message for the directory. I struggled with this because, frankly, a photo directory is such a unique thing, and feels old fashioned. I haven't been a part of any other group that does a photo directory - aside from schools, I suppose, which have something similar in terms of a yearbook. But that serves a different purpose. Yearbooks are for nostalgia - not for getting to know people. Ultimately, though, as I flip through the pages of what will now be known as the "old directory", I see the advantages of a bound book that holds faces and names. In our society where people are coming and going all the time, it feels so meaningful to literally hold our church family in my hands, to see their faces and say their names. And I wonder, even if we're not a part of this church or any church, how we might start to see the Divine in all faces we encounter -whether it's in "real life" or in some virtual way like social media. For more, read below the message that will be printed in our new directory. A Message from our Minister In a time when the church at large is changing in some very profound ways, we always try to remind ourselves that the church is people – not a building. The church is Christ’s body on earth – Christ’s hands, feet, heart and soul. In your hands, you hold a representation of that Body – a group of people brought together by the Spirit to love God and neighbour in this little corner of the world. While church directories might feel a bit antiquated in our modern age of social media and technology, this is actually a great resource for prayer and fellowship. Outside of trying to remember the name of that person we chatted with over coffee, we can also use this directory to occasionally turn the pages and pray for one another. We see the faces of those we know and love so well and offer a blessing for them, and we see the faces of those we don’t know and pray that we might grow in that relationship. As this directory is being developed in the spring of 2018, we are up to some new and exciting things at Erindale United, and have recently welcomed several new members into our midst. We know, though, that this directory will become outdated almost immediately. New people will join us and not be in the directory. Children will grow and leave us. Sadly, some of our saints will move on to life beyond death. Such is the normal progression of life. Still, if we find ourselves looking at this directory again several years from now, we might give thanks for the ways in which God is always moving ahead of us and guiding us forward. We give thanks for the Holy Spirit of wind and fire who is always changing and remolding, and we give thanks for Christ who makes all things new. We give thanks that even as our church and the world around us looks different year to year, God’s abundant love for us is unchanging and unceasing. As our United Church creed says, we are not alone. We live in God’s world. This directory is a testament to that simple and beautiful fact. Thanks be to God.
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