According to the town`s local newspaper in Carrot River, Saskatchewan, the local Roman Catholic priest, Father Mariusz Zajak, attributes his catch of a 18.3 pound Walleye, setting a Saskatchewan record, to prayer. According to the Nipawin Journal, Fr. Zajak got the nibble precisely as he was praying "The Magnificat" (Luke 1:46-55) as part of the Divine Office which he, as a priest, is required to read daily. "I always pray when I fish," he said, "Including times when my brother priest and I are fishing in Poland. We'll sing and praise the Lord and sing 'The Magnificat' when we catch fish." But sometimes prayer isn`t so immediate.

If this isn`t treasure enough for any believer as the year begins then two gifts I received at Christmas complete a trinity of pious refreshment. From the Calder family via the Robinson family, I received a bottle of Wash Away Your Sins bubble bath. Now I do not normally, or ever for that matter, take a bubble bath, but this gift makes me think I should change my habits. The label makes several remarkable claims:

'Tempting do-it-again scent', '100%Holy'
'The Sanctified Soak' 'Removes Stubborn Guilt'
'For Liars, cheaters, and wrong-doers"
'Bishop tested, Cardinal Approved'

The directions for use are these:
1. Kneel Before Thy Tub
2.Reflect Upon Wrong Doing
3.Pour in enough bubble bath to equal thy sins ( double the amount you estimate)
4.Submerge Thyself in Blessed Bubbles
5.Arise Cleansed from Sin and Ready to-do-it again

The third message-laiden gift I received was from Karen Bergenstein, our student intern. She gave me a statue of Moses beautifully moulded in fine plastic. Moses is holding the stone tablets with the 10 Commandments and his shepherd's staff. The charm of this little beauty is the accompanying guarantee that the stone tablets are removable. I think that it was this extra convenience of being able to remove the 10 commandments that clinched the purchase for Karen, whom, I believe, thinks that I have a tendency to dispense with the parts of scripture that don't suit me.

Now these bits of religious trivia do not, to my mind, capture the most attractive elements of the Christian faith. In that respect they are the very opposite of all of today's scripture readings which do express the very best that our faith tradition has to offer.

Religion at its best does two things (in fact it does many more, but at least these two). First of all, it raises us to another plain of insight and experience. It raises us to those places which theologian Marcus Borg calls 'thin places'. Borg describes thin places as places where 'the boundary between the two levels (of reality)becomes very soft, porous, and permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us." (The Heart of Christianity: Marcus Borg, Harper San Francisco, 2003, p. 156).

Secondly, religion at its best, challenges our personal and collective values and conventions. A strong case can be made that the aspect of the religious experience of the Hebrew people which distinguished their understanding of God most profoundly from any of the neighbouring nations was precisely this idea of God being greater than the ruler, or the tribe, or the state, or even the religious establishment. This was a progressive revelation which took place over hundred of years. But truly, Hebrew religion developed from being a nature-based tribal religion to what is call ethical monotheism, a characteristic we share with Judaism from which we sprang and from Islam.

In contrast, the religions of their near neighbours served one primary social function: to preserve and maintain the social and economic status quo. These religions typically identified divine rule or even God with the pharoah, or the king, or whatever name was given to the top dog in the social system.

Today's readings consistently do the opposite. Today's readings challenge and relativize social values and institutions. And therefore, they remind us, like they did the Hebrew people of that time, that no social or conceptual system, no ideology, no civilization, and no value system fully capture the transcendence and righteousness of God.

The prophet Micah undercuts the prevailing religious practice of his time, which was sacrificial offerings in the temple for sin, by telling the people that what God wants more than anything else is ethical commitment and not ritual offerings they can buy in the market. The offering God wants is their ethical commitment,

He (God) has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8)

St Paul challenges conventional wisdom when he says

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world...For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. ( 1Corinthians 1:20ff)

And to cap it all off, the gospel puts forward a truly revolutionary hierarchy of personal and social values which is the complete reversal of conventional wisdom- not just the conventional wisdom of 2000 years ago but of every age.

We have in Matthew's gospel what is usually referred to as the beatitudes-which you have heard many times: blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the weak, the hungry and the peacemakers. Nothing about this statement makes any sense to us. Dominant values tells us that such persons are not blessed but cursed.

How many monuments do we have in this city to peacemakers? How many days have we set aside to remember the poor and the bereaved? Why is social policy supporting the poor, the weak, and the hungry, at every level of government, so difficult to implement? Conventional wisdom says such persons are losers, indeed, they are not worthy of blessing.

Our culture, like thousands before it, is bound up in the unending cycle of what Walter Wink called the myth of redemptive violence. The myth of redemptive violence is at the root of all television programs about crime, is the fodder our children ingest in video games, and is the primary basis, still, for our criminal justice system. Violence and threat are best addressed by violence and threat. We all live by it deep in our hearts. It is our first impulse. The tendency to violence is in our blood, as is our thirst for revenge over forgiveness.

We all rejoiced in President Bush`s inaugural address this week in which he challenged Americans and the world to work for the spread of liberty and democracy. What enormous potential that great nation has to influence this throughout the world. But what I see is a nation whose primary instrument of foreign policy is armed intervention. As a person of faith I simply do not believe that such a method can bring about the desired results. My belief in Jesus Christ tells me that victory cannot be found there.

Religion which is trotted out for celebrity weddings and state funerals is pretty but usually superficial. Friday, I cringed as I watched a report of Donald Trump's latest wedding- a report which took place in front of a very impressive stone gothic church in Palm Beach, Florida. That church is complicite in the Trump value system and condones the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent in that lavish media event.

The best of our religion tells us that whether we are persons or nations we will become what we hate if we use violence and other ignoble means to achieve our ends. So easily religious practice becomes superficial when it loses its ethical cutting edge.

Friends, when religion says this to us over and over and over again, century after century, then religion is doing what religion is supposed to do: it is setting our sights on a plain of thought and action above our primal instincts. In closing, I quote a passage written by Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, in his recent book entitled Reimagining Christianity (John Wiley & Sons, 2005, p. 168ff, which identifies the self-offering of Jesus Christ with the entire biblical tradition of social critique,

The story of the crucifixion challenges society's primary illusion: that the killing of victims is a noble act...In the cross we see a God who chooses to suffer violence rather than sponsor it. This isn't a God I could have thought up. Mine would look a little more imperial, like Caesar Augustus...(Christ) the broken and ruined man asks me the awful question that lurks under our fear and ignorance. Its the question hiding behind every act of violence. What will you do, what sort of human being will you be when you realize that you are not in control and that you are marked for death? What kind of life will you choose to live while you still have time? ...This is the secret of Jesus-the secret of the only true power, the power that gives itself away-the meeting place not only of the great traditions but also of all those who long for a new humanity.