Sermon: Calvin/Deer Park United Church
Kevin Parks, Sunday August 24, 2025 Proper 16, Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
Isaiah 58: 9b-14; Luke 13: 10-17
Well, how wonderful to be here with you, finally, after many months of conversation online and planning and preparation, this day--where I am present here with you, in the flesh, has finally arrived.
I want to say to the congregation of Deer Park United Church, “Thank you” for extending your invitation to me to be your minister. And thank you to the congregation of Calvin Presbyterian for walking together with your siblings in Ecumenical Shared Ministry through an extended period of transition—of searching for the path God is calling all of us forward to share in ministry together. I am grateful for the faith and trust of all of you, as I begin this new stage in my career and of my vocation in ministry.
Sermons are not typically autobiographical…but today I’m going to make an exception to this rule. The complexity of my family situation that has had to be navigated to arrive at this point is a something you might like to hear about. You see, my spouse, Dana Pardy, is also called to ordered ministry in the United Church, and is, in fact a few steps ahead of me in the formal process, having been ordained at the beginning of June at the Bermuda Nova Scotia Regional Council meeting. Dana and I have been working since last fall on a very special sort of trick:
We wanted to find two places, two United Church congregations, who felt called to be in ministry with us and, for us called to be with them. And these two places needed to be sufficiently proximal to one another so that Dana and I could continue to live in the same house!
Believe me when I say that this was a daunting task, and that many people watching us work through our process reiterated over and again that they were praying hard for us!
Being called is a very biblical concept. We know about Jesus calling the disciples, and we know the First Testament stories of the call of Moses and Jeremiah, and Samuel. An option in the lectionary for today was to read the call of Jeremiah. We didn’t do that because I want to end my message on a different theme. But, since I’m telling you about discerning the paths of all our callings, let’s take a quick moment to consider that in the bible, the notion of being called is closely linked to being set apart, consecrated (to use a churchy term), for a special purpose. I am regularly asked to talk about my call to ministry—it’s a hazard of being in the candidacy process; everyone wants to hear ‘your story’!—and the truth is that my sense of call extends well into my youth.
I relate to Jeremiah. He was likely about 17 when God said to him “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you” However, Jeremiah’s answer to God was not at all confidence inspiring. And when 17 year old Kevin, and then 24 and 33 and 45 year old Kevin heard the God of all creation saying similar words to me, my answer was much like Jeremiah’s protestations that —“I’m just a youth, and I really don’t know what to say”
But, as with Jeremiah, God kept coming back to tell me messages like
“I am with you,
and you will go where I send you,
and you will say the things I tell you to say.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m drawn to the Celtic image of the Holy Spirit as the Wild Goose, running around honking like crazy to get our attention, nipping at our heels, stirring up chaos, getting us to follow into what John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King’s collaborator and former Democrat in the US House of Representatives called “good trouble”. Good trouble is a work of the Holy Spirit; it’s the call that God makes apparent in each of our lives, and about which we have to decide how we will answer. So, this is my story, and I love hearing your stories of how the persistent nudge, or an irresistible presence has featured in your spiritual journey.
Returning for one more moment to the story of Dana and me seeking two ministry placements: I said a moment ago that being called was to be set apart, and that is so in the formal “calling” of a minister to serve in a pastoral charge. This “call” is a special, covenantal relationship between a member of the order of ministry and a congregation—Emily is called to be in ministry with Calvin Presbyterian. And my partner Dana has “been called” to be in ministry at St. Mark’s United Church in Scarborough. For me, at this point, I’m on a path of preparation toward ordered ministry, and at a point where I need what the United Church calls a “Supervised Ministry Experience” or SME. Now, not so long ago the church simply called this ‘Internship’, which is a very relatable terminology found in many professions.
But…you know, the church…
Like many other institutional bodies, the church does like to fancifully describe things that are actually quite straightforward! So, if you ever hear me speaking about ‘My SME”, what I’m talking about is ‘this relationship’ that you and I have entered into, and the way the church is evaluating my readiness to move onward toward ordination.
Formally, the Shining Waters Region of the United Church of Canada—at the request of Deer Park United Church, has appointed me here to Deer Park in this Ecumenical Shared Ministry with Calvin Presbyterian so I can complete these final stages toward full ordination to ministry in Christ’s church.
Now, that’s the recent history, but you may know a bit of my backstory—I have spent my life living into God’s call by fulfilling that vocation through the Ministry of Music. As I move into this new role my focus will be much broader--I am fully your minister in every respect. I am here to lead worship, to provide pastoral care, to be fully engaged in all aspects of congregational life. I will be authorized to celebrate the sacraments.
I will be supported by faculty at the Atlantic School of Theology, where I am a student the Master of Divinity program —there’s even a course related to my work here.
I will be supported by the Atlantic Office of Vocations and the Atlantic Region OV minister, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Richardson. I will have a local Educational Supervisor—the Rev. Dan Benson, whom you know well, and with whom I will be in weekly contact.
Bob Muncaster, Ann Atkey, Kathryn Hanson and Karen Breen-Reid will be a support team of lay members who will reflect with me on the practices of ministry and my experience of learning here, and your experience of my leadership.
And, until I am ordained, Deer Park will have a Pastoral Charge Supervisor—the Rev. Cynthia O’Connell from Glebe Road United. (For you Calvin folks, Cynthia’s role is akin to an Interim Moderator) Cynthia will attend those meetings of the Deer Park governing bodies where a member of the order of ministry is required for quorum.
This past week I have been learning about you. What I’ve seen of a typical week in the office I must say looks very familiar from my past experience. And that is comforting! Emily and I have spent some time talking about our Ecumenical Shared Ministry and how we will work together on Worship and move into the start a variety of projects for the fall. I think we’re both excited for this new collaboration and the promise of the time before us.
So, that is the nuts and bolts…but it isn’t really the message I want to bring you today. Let’s turn to the scriptures that were read for us earlier. We read from the second part of the prophecy of Isaiah, and I’ll also touch on the healing story from Lukes Gospel.
In Isaiah, the writer makes two arguments using conditional clauses—an “If/Then” construction:
58:9b If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
58:10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday
The pointing of the finger and the speaking of evil got my attention. It would be easy to turn this back on any number of situations where we’ve felt abused by a person or a system. Maybe a bit like Jesus when confronted by the officious temple authority who complained about Jesus doing good on the sabbath. But I want to suggest that there’s a broader intent to this motif.
I took time over the past week to watch most of the proceedings of the 45th General Council of the United Church of Canada which took place in Calgary last weekend. (I also watched some of the PCC General Assembly earlier in the summer) There’s lots to unpack, but I want to zone in on the theme for the weekend—Visions and Dreams. I listened to the theme speaker, The Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson, who is the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ in the United States. She spoke passionately about what daring justice, deep spirituality and bold discipleship might look like in the 21st Century church, with the visionary call to realize that, as we are now one quarter of the way through this 21st century, our present work is to lay the groundwork for the church of the 22nd century.[1] [2] [3]This may sound a little ridiculous, far-fetched at first, but think about how slowly the church responds to change! But think of how much change Christ’s church has seen the past 25 years, since the turn of the present millenium, and then consider the changes of 40 and 50 years ago to which Christ’s church still seems to be adjusting. And look at what has happened in society and culture: We’re living into the seeds of hyper-capitalism and the conditions that created our rising Christian Nationalism sown in the last decades of the 20th Century. While we hit repeat on telling the story about our declining influence and relevance that we have been telling and retelling for 40, 50 even 60 years, then, Yes! If we want to escape into a new reality we must turn to laying the groundwork for the turn of the next century. We might wonder if the church will even exist, but perhaps this focus on bad news is really the yoke; the wagging finger and the evil speech, the hindering thing that binds us ineffectivness, that keeps us—the body of Christ –from realizing the potential that is ours. What if, instead, we turned away from this inward focus—Rev. Dr. Thompson implored us to stop navel gazing!—What if we turned away—repented—from a focus on the false idol of scarcity and instead followed the advice of Isaiah the prophet to take very seriously the call to make service to others our core purpose. Not only would we be doing something really useful, but our spirits would be uplifted. And we’d be seen to be a light that projects hope, that believes there is possibility and positivity in our future.
Further, Isaiah says that by satisfying the needs of others, our needs will be satisfied; that where we have been parched—and I take this to mean ‘spiritually dry’—there we will be strengthened to face our circumstances, and that our dry condition will be quenched by waters that never fail.
Friends, there is spiritual thirst all around us. We encounter it in the conversations we have with one another. We perceive it as we meet people on the street, in the subway, at work, at school. We have the tools to be like cool water that quenches the yearning we have to explore and express what is deep in our souls, in our innermost being. We can do this by recognizing the needs of those we meet. And I see that we’re already doing this at Calvin/Deer Park, and have been for a century, now. We provide space for several AA groups. This hospitality is a satisfaction of the needs of others. I was delighted to meet members of the Toronto Children’s Chorus this week preparing for their first rehearsals, and to hear their plans for creating community with their choristers, celebrating their return to another season of beautiful music making. We’re doing more than simply giving them a home, this act contributes to their success in building community, and in teaching young people skills around teamwork, and creativity that they will take forward in other parts of their lives. They and their family’s needs are being satisfied through our ability to make space for their program and to show them hospitality and welcome here. These are just two examples among many…I have been learning about the Lay Care Team, the Women of the Way, the food bank, the Saturday breakfast.
And this is all very good. But, I believe it is only the start, its scratching the surface of the difference we can be here in mid-town Toronto at the intersection of Yonge and St. Clair.
Isaiah has a really neat way to express what happens when communities fully embrace the possibility of their ministry and mission…He says:
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.”
This by simply being faithful to the call God has for us—to satisfy the needs of others. I wonder, what does it look like to be a repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in?
As Karen Georgia Thompson said to the court of GC 45, the ‘ABC’s’—the measuring of our relevance in terms of Attendance, Building and Cash—is not our future. She’s clear that we need to be a people-centred church, that “it is time for the church to be attentive to healing the body of Christ.”[4] And our prime example for this is Jesus, as exemplified in today’s Gospel reading in Luke.
Luke describes Jesus’ healing of a woman who was afflicted by a spirit that had contorted body her in such a way that she could not stand up straight for 18 years. Jesus lays his hands on her, proclaiming her healed. Jesus didn’t hesitate about this, he got down to business and met this women’s profound need. And we tend to notice the response of the temple official who complains that Jesus is breaking a sacred law, one of the commandments about honoring the sabbath. It would be easy to conclude that the temple official felt Jesus was, in Isaiah’s words “trampling the Sabbath”. But Jesus sees things differently. He didn’t allow the convention of Sabbath observance to hinder him. In fact, for Jesus it’s a trampling of the sabbath to fail to meet the needs of this woman, a prized daughter of Abraham, who had suffered so. Isaiah says we honor God the most when we are “not going [our] own ways, serving [our] own interests, or pursuing [our] own affairs. In Isaiah’s poetic words, when we set our attention on satisfying the needs of others near to us, “then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.” What an incredible image. That doing God’s will would have us riding upon the heights of the earth. Think for a moment…when have you experienced that feeling, when serving someone else’s needs? What happened to take you there? Perhaps the Holy Spirit was in the middle of that.
In a moment we are going to sing a new hymn found in the brand new United Church music resource, Then Let Us Sing![5] I was on the development team for TLUS, so we’re going to get familiar with some excellent new material found there. This hymn is set to a tune you know. And the words call us into this dream and vision of what the body of Christ can truly be when we approach daring justice, deep spirituality and bold discipleship as the core of our mission.
I want to conclude with an invitation. I’m going to be spending Thursday noon-times the next few weeks in the front garden of our church, at one of the picnic tables. I’m going to take up an initiative of many United Churches in this centennial year called “100 Tables: Creating Spaces of Welcome”.[6] I’ll have a sign promoting and informing that I am there to meet people for conversation, to hear their stories of faith and spirituality, to hear their concerns and to celebrate our shared belonging. You are welcome to come along and meet our neighbours along with me.
And I look forward to meeting all of you, learning your stories, sharing in your joys and sorrows. I will be soon begin a pastoral visiting routine. If you are a member of Deer Park congregation and would desire a visit—or know someone who would appreciate a visit at home, here at the church or at a local coffee shop, I’m very much up for that. Please do be in touch. And I look forward to making much good trouble with you all! Amen.
[1] Dr. Thompson’s first theme presentation is at 36’12” of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY-x_4TmNtg&list=PLQDu-SgFb3Rhok2eOrSyj3XOW73EIWBkd&index=14
[2] Dr. Thompson’s second theme presentation is at 23’17” of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pCjvT8WCCQ&list=PLQDu-SgFb3Rhok2eOrSyj3XOW73EIWBkd&index=5
[3] Dr. Thompson’s third theme presentation is at 5’00” of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWWcMDd21dA&list=PLQDu-SgFb3Rhok2eOrSyj3XOW73EIWBkd&index=8
[4] From theme presentation, Rev. Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson, Friday Aug 8, 2025, GC45 of the United Church of Canada.
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