Greenborough Community Church

04/21/2026

Is the church called to be relevant?

"My reign is NOT of this order" - John 18:36

In the passion according to John, Jesus and Pilate have a discourse on the nature of kingship that is often overlooked, glossed over for the more dramatic scenes, yet this dialogue contains the kernel of the church's identity and so her mission (the word translated as church - not a good translation- is always in the feminine).

Pilate asks if Jesus sees himself as a monarch (the embodiment of power) of Judea (in John's Gospel the word mis-translated as Jews should be Judeans referring only to the tribe of Judah, the collective term Hebrew is used for all of Israel, hence letter to the Hebrews).

Jesus replies that his reign is not of this "order" and this is an important distinction to bear in mind. In the Greek, the word 'cosmos' does not mean the physical world (atoms, particles, galaxies, trees, gases, etc.,) rather the origin of the word is the verb, "to put in order, to adorn, to arrange in a sequence." What Jesus is here stating is the incompatibility of the way in which God governs and every (fallen) human order or government.

Christ makes it clear: "No one can serve two masters" and this is said without exception. It is an error to view that as followers of Christ we are called to "render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar and to God the things that are God's" as if these are compatible, they are NOT. For both lay claim to the same space, namely the human heart, mind, will, strength. When Jesus gave this reply to his interlocuters, he knew their allegiance was not to God to but Caesar, evidenced by the coin (silver denarius) they carried, that bore the image of the emperor.

What is overlooked here is that this coin was forbidden inside of the temple - the 2nd commandment - so whoever had the coin was in violation of these laws. Outside of the temple, the coin was banned from uses in places of "ill repute" such as brothels as a form of payment as the coin was linked to the person of the emperor. To use the coin in such places was regarded as "treason" punishable by death. The choice is thus always, "Christ or Caesar" not "Christ and Caesar" for that is not a choice.

Either the church lives out the reign of God or she participates in this present (fallen) order, that as Paul tells us is fated to perish. Either the church is called to be relevant to a dying order, groaning under the weight of sin, subjected to the power of death OR is she called to follow the resurrected Lord who reigns, awaiting his return upon the clouds, bringing about a new creation, free from disobedience and death?

The angels asked a question of the women who came to the tomb on Resurrection Sunday, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" In the same way, why are we concerned with serving an order that is in its death throws?

The church is called to be faithful and NOT relevant. The church is called to persevere NOT to succeed. The church is called to preach Christ and him crucified NOT to be "useful" to a fallen order, preaching "cheap grace"

The church is an outpost of the kingdom of God, that invades this present order, revealing its wisdom as foolishness, is wealth as poverty, its strength as weakness. Its life as death.

The church is not called to reform this order but to witness to its enmity with God and its eventual destruction by His righteous judgment. If this is the case, then this order cannot be "of God," that is God "willed by God" , nevertheless he does allow it, to reveal it as a fraud and usurper.

As for the often referenced Romans 13, it is helpful to see this within the paradigm or ethic of love, "pray for those who persecute you, do not repay evil for evil, etc.," and not to place the emperor within some other, special category. Laws may be just or fair and NOT. For the church to obey unjust laws is to participate in the rebellion of this fallen order.

That the reign of God and the order of humanity are inherently oppositional, and so incompatible, is revealed in that Christ was crucified (for claiming to be a king) that Paul was beheaded in Rome, that Peter and the other disciples (save one) were ultimately put to death by Rome. So much for the "tolerance" and "religious freedom."

When Rome looked at the church, she saw a threat to her status as the "light of the world" and the figure of the emperor as "the Chosen One" given a divine mandate (in the case of Rome the god Jupiter) to bring peace (through conquest) and prosperity (by enslavement and extraction).

The church cannot bless such a state, any state, even if that state identifies as "Christian" (It is not - for every follower of Christ is part of the body of Christ, hence nations cannot be "Christian" in any sense).

The church is called to stand and witness to a kingdom that is not of this fallen order, where love, truth, beauty, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, joy, selflessness, radiate from the soul outward. Where sins are forgiven and there is newness of life.

The church cannot seek power, nor entrance to the halls of power, but in humility, serve her Sovereign, until she hears the words,
"Come, you who are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."

04/15/2026

Every night for forty years, he put a lantern in the window.
That was all. A light on a hill above the Ohio River, visible from the Kentucky side. No words. No signs. Just the light, burning every night from dusk until dawn, in all weather, for four decades without stopping.
Anyone who saw it knew what it meant.
Come.

His name was John Rankin. He was a Presbyterian minister from Tennessee who hated slavery so deeply that he left his home state rather than preach the gospel in a place that practiced it. He crossed the Ohio River on New Year's Eve 1821, rowing his family across the icy water in the dark, and settled in a small river town called Ripley, Ohio, where the free state of Ohio looked directly across at the slave state of Kentucky.
He was twenty-eight years old. He had a wife named Jean, a handful of children, and a conviction that would eventually put a $3,000 bounty on his head.
He spent the next sixty years trying to set the world right.

Ripley sat fifty miles southeast of Cincinnati on a bend in the Ohio River. On clear days you could see Kentucky from the front porch. On quiet nights you could hear it. The town was border country — a place where the line between freedom and bo***ge ran literally down the middle of the water, where people crossed in both directions for very different reasons, and where the law was whatever the people who had guns decided it was.
Rankin moved his family to a house on Liberty Hill above the town in 1830 — a brick house that stood alone on the hillside, visible from the Kentucky shore. He built 100 stone steps from the riverbank up to his door.
He put the lantern in the window.
He and Jean unlocked their door at night, kept a fire always burning, and waited.

In February 1838, on a night when the Ohio River had partially frozen over, a young enslaved woman named Eliza Harris appeared at the Kentucky bank with her small child in her arms.
Slave catchers were behind her.
The river ice was breaking up — thin in places, treacherous everywhere. No boat could cross. No person who looked at that ice would have called what she did rational. But she looked at the lantern on the hill across the water and she stepped out onto the ice anyway.
She ran.
When a chunk broke beneath her she leaped to the next one. When that one cracked she pushed herself forward. She was carrying a child the whole time. She fell more than once. She got up. The slave catchers watched from the bank — even they would not follow her out onto that ice.
She reached the Ohio side.
She climbed 100 stone steps in wet clothes in the cold.
She knocked on the door of a man she had never met.
The Rankins took her in. Dry clothes. Warm food. A fire. A safe place to rest. And then, quietly, arrangements for the next stop north.

Rankin told that story years later at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. A professor named Calvin Stowe heard it.
Calvin Stowe went home and told his wife.
His wife was Harriet Beecher Stowe.
She used it as the most famous scene in Uncle Tom's Cabin — Eliza crossing the ice with her child, leaping from floe to floe, reaching freedom through sheer desperate will. The novel sold 300,000 copies in its first year in America. It sold 1.5 million in Britain. Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe during the Civil War and is said to have called her "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
The scene that stopped the world — Eliza on the ice — happened at John Rankin's door.

The slave catchers came for the Rankins regularly. A $3,000 bounty was placed on John Rankin's head by Kentucky slave owners — enough money to buy a house. Armed mobs gathered outside his home more than once. Proslavery men kidnapped people in Ripley. They burned barns. They threw rocks and rotten eggs at Rankin when he preached.
The Rankins kept shotguns in the house. They were not pacifists.
They also never turned anyone away.
In thirteen children, Jean and John Rankin built a family operation. Every one of those children knew their role. The door stayed unlocked. The fire stayed lit. The lantern stayed in the window. Not one of the more than 2,000 people who passed through that house on their way north was ever captured after reaching Ripley.
Not one.
William Lloyd Garrison — the most famous abolitionist in America — called himself Rankin's disciple. Rankin's Letters on American Slavery, written originally to persuade his own brother who had purchased slaves in Virginia, became the textbook of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His brother read the letters, freed his slaves, and moved to Ohio.

Six of Rankin's sons and one grandson fought in the Union Army when the Civil War finally came.
Every single one of them came home alive.
He and Jean called it a sign of God's favor.
When the war ended and someone asked Henry Ward Beecher — one of the most famous preachers in America — who had abolished slavery, Beecher answered:
"Reverend John Rankin and his sons did it."

Jean Rankin died in 1878. John Rankin died in 1886 at age 93. They are buried together in Maplewood Cemetery in Ripley, Ohio.
His house still stands on Liberty Hill above the river. It is a National Historic Landmark now. You can climb the 100 stone steps to the front door and look south across the Ohio River into Kentucky, the same view those 2,000 people had when they finally reached the other side.
When they crossed that water they were looking for a light.
It was always there.
He said it himself: "My house has been the door of freedom to many human beings. There was much happiness in giving safety to the trembling fugitives. They were all children of God."
Forty years of keeping that lantern burning.
Most Americans have never heard his name.

03/30/2026

GOD THE SCAPEGOAT

In the Jewish tradition the holiest day of each year is, “The Day of Atonement” (a poor translation to be sure but then translators have very little poetic imagination). On this day, the High Priest would make a unique sacrifice on behalf of all of the people of Israel (himself and the priests and Levites included as they were distinct - no tribal inheritance was allotted for them on account of the shedding of blood) so that God would look upon the sacrifice and "remember" his covenant.

Part of the liturgy of included the choosing of two male goats by the High Priest. One goat offered up as an offering to God, the other tied with a red ribbon, (some traditions ad a bell) would be led out into the desert and offered to Az**el (the only time this name is mentioned in all of Scripture, although that did not stop the imagination of writers to conjure up all kinds of stories). This second goat was given the task of bearing the sins of the people,
(interestingly this passage is overlooked regarding the theory-and it is a theory-of substitutionary atonement).

The events of this holy day in Judaism reflects what Rene Girard termed, "the scapegoat mechanism." Put simply it is the observation that conflict is natural in society. Conflict threatens unity, so a victim (guilty or innocence does not matter) is chosen to bear the collective guilt and expiate it from the group. This works for a time but, needs to be repeated over and over.

What is important here is that this was not unique to Israel, as evidenced in cultures and faiths all over the world. Rather, what this reveals is the all too human “need,” to blame some person or group in order to create a temporary sense of comm-unity. Until the next series of conflicts warrant yet another "victim" and there is a temporary "peace" again. Over and over and over.

Is not our current world is awash in this mechanism of scapegoating based on language, culture, sexual orientation, politics, religion, etc.? Each year or month a new group is chose to bear the ills of our culture.

What is remarkable in the Gospels is that in events of Holy Week, God takes up the role of the scapegoat. God allows himself, to be “pushed out of the world unto the cross” (Bonhoeffer). God takes upon himself ALL of our sins, EVERY sin. As T E Fretheim writes, “God has chosen to bear the people’s sins rather than deal with them on a strictly legal terms. For God to assume such a burden, for God to continue to bear the burnt of Israel’s rejection, meant continued life for the people…”

In Christ, God becomes our scapegoat, the blame of all the ills of life, past, present, and future events. Let us confess that we hold God responsible for his “failure” as evidenced in our attempt to "build a better world"! And yet, is not the cross the ultimate symbol of failure, loss? That our world is broken and God will not or worse cannot heal the brokenness so we have to do it without him.

But what if the cross is the ultimate symbol of redemptive love? What if the cross reveals a love that is not dependent upon power but weakness, not wisdom but foolishness? Love that overcomes not through conquest but through defeat. God the scapegoat, accepting shame, violence and horrible death of a criminal! This would be hardly believable and yet what is even more, as James Allison writes, "God does not hold it against us." He does not blame us for our scapegoating but accepts it and through that breaks it asunder. Allison writes, "There is an angry deity in this equation, and it is us, in whose midst, God, quite without violence, manifests the depth of his forgiving love by plumbing the depths of, and thus defanging, our violence.”

Seen in this light, the cross is the complete rejection of all earthly power (sustained by violence in all its forms) of every earthly ruler as a thief and pretender not worthy of praise nor adoration.

The events of Good Friday then, serve to judge not God, but our fallen world. Us. We who accuse God, who make of him a scapegoat have our accusations hurled back against us! Our striving for relevance (the church is never commanded to be so) seeking audience in the halls of power, or fighting "culture wars." Our mandate is to follow Christ, to be crucified with him (Romans 6: 3). Our task is to be faithful even unto the moment of death (Revelation 2:10) that we may receive the crown of life.

The events of this Holy Week, reveal the very destruction of this flawed sacrificial system that always requires a victim. God the Scapegoat destroys the power of this "system" liberating us from the cycle of violence. The people of God are commanded to never lift up the sword (even in defense as Peter did) for this would only mean to regress to a broken system where violence and war are sanctified. This is not the way of God! This is the way of man!

The way of God is the way of Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, not triumph but defeat! Not conquest but loss! And yet in defeat, in loss, in being overcome, God yet regins! The darkness of Good Friday gives way to the glorious light of Easter morn!

So the faithful greet each other with the words: "Christ is risen!" And the response is: "He is risen indeed!"

03/11/2026

A PRAYER OF ST ISAAC THE SYRIAN for the Lenten Season

But Thou, O Lord Jesus Christ my God, the treasure of all good things:
Grant Thou me perfect repentance and a fervent heart that I may wholeheartedly come forth to seek Thee.

Without Thee, I will become estranged from all good things. Therefore, grant Thou me Thy Grace, O Good One.
May the Father Who didst beget Thee from His bosom recreate in me the image of Thine icon. I have abandoned Thee; do not forsake me. I have separated myself from Thee; come forth to find me.

And when Thou findest me, lead me into Thy pastures, and number me amongst the sheep of Thy select flock, and nurture me with Thy divine mysteries, which dwell within a pure heart, wherein the brilliance of Thy revelations are made manifest. This brilliance serves as consolation and refreshment for them who toil in sorrows and various dishonors on account of Thee.

May we all be worthy of receiving this illumination,
through Thy grace and compassion, O Jesus Christ our Savior,
unto the ages of ages. Amen.

02/17/2026

For centuries, Christianity evolved into a broad spectrum of beliefs and practices — but now something surprising is happening. Across the world, millions ar...

01/24/2026

Due to the snow storm that will engulf southern Ontario, we will not have in-person service on SUNDAY, JANUARY 25.

We will meet online (ZOOM) for worship, as we continue to explore the life of Abraham.

Click on the ZOOM link to join the service:
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/834002624?pwd=cjhpVWorNVN0ay9zTkVZNUtXcVVwdz09

the passcode is 121057

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

01/21/2026

You are most welcomed to join us as we celebrate 75 years!
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 08 at 10:30 am with LUNCH to follow the Anniversary Service

12/05/2025

Join us for our Annual Christmas Cantata Service on the 4th Sunday of Advent, Dec 21st at 10:30 am

11/13/2025

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11/11/2025

Today, we remember those who paid the highest price on the altar of peace to ensure that we have liberty.

Lest we forget!