Let us pray: Loving God, the path we are required to follow is not always an easy one. There are hard things done, and hard things said. Some of these are said and done in the name of faith, but our hearts and minds question how they could be. Grant to us an ability to discern – to think with your heart and to feel with your mind, that we might be more faithful followers of you. Amen.

The task of the preacher is sometimes to find meaning from the story of scripture, sometimes to find meaning from the events of the present day – whether those events are local, national or global, and at all times to take those two – scripture and the present times and find the way they connect with each other to give meaning to life and the life of faith. Of course that is a very simplistic description of the whole process and it could easily be said that there is much more involved. John Wesley described a quadrilateral which added two other sources of inspiration. Two of the corners were the aforementioned Scripture and Experience – which I will say is a synonym for the current events I described earlier. The other two corners were described as tradition and reason. In other words, what we've done before and what makes sense.

In the quadrilateral the four corners connect with each other as a tool for discernment about what the spirit is saying to the community of faith. Wesley described it as both a tool and as an observation – in other words, people intuitively use the four corners of the quadrilateral to engage in theological reflection – Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience, assuming of course that there is deep enough grounding in each of these areas, but the quadrilateral as a description of the way that we engage in theological consideration of issues, can also be a tool – as a method to be applied to the exercise of trying to determine what the will of God is, what the path the spirit is calling us to is in any given situation.

I first became aware of the quadrilateral in the time around 1988 – which of course is a storied time in the history of The United Church of Canada. It was proposed as a somewhat ancient – not all that ancient in terms of the Christian faith, but certainly more ancient when considered in relation to the age of our particular denomination, tool for discernment. Not only that, but it came from one of the founders of one of the denominations which comprise The United Church of Canada and therefore was deemed to have some import in the discussions of the time.

If you don't recognise the date 1988 and its importance in the history of The United Church of Canada, it is the year that General Council met in Victoria, British Columbia and at which the decision was made that homosexuality was in and of itself not a barrier to ordination. Of course, the discussion was not limited to discussions about who could serve as ministers in the church, and all the debates, new and old, along with some of the ugliness that such debates seem necessarily to create and also some of the grace that also emanates out of such discussions, resulted in a huge amount of turmoil in the part of the church which we call The United Church of Canada.

It was a hard time in the life of our denomination, and looking back from the space of twenty-three years it is hard to remember just how divisive the debate was. That's probably a good thing, but it is also because the denomination has moved a long way from those days. It also has a long way to go. There are some in the Christian community who would hold The United Church of Canada in very high esteem for the way in which it addressed the situation at a very early time (although some would wonder how such an issue even twenty-three years ago could be considered early) and there are many others who condemn the denomination for the decisions made back in 1988. There is much more to be done – within our own denomination, to make sure that the decisions that were determined then are actually lived out, but even more surely in the Christian faith to make it a more welcoming and inclusive place to express our faith in God as followers of the way of Jesus.

Wesley's quadrilateral asserts that discernment is a connected exercise – an exercise that uses our holy writings along with our experience, the experience of our ancestors in the form of tradition and our God given brains and hearts in the form of reason to determine just what the path to follow should be. Now there were some in the debates in 1988 that said that even in the quadrilateral the four corners were not equal in importance and that Wesley emphasised scripture as the most important element, but others of course said that even just the introduction of three other elements was a step both in acknowledging that our intepretation of scripture is an outcome of the other three characteristics whether we apply them intuitively or specifically.

I am pleased with the acknowledgement that reason, tradition and experience have a role to play in the practice of discernment – in the task of detemining what God would have us do in a given situation or as a way of guiding our lives. Today's readings are a case in point. I titled this reflection “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” because that's kind of the way I feel about the two passages that Barb read this morning. Both of them are difficult. As was said, the story of the stoning of Stephen invites us into a consideration of persecution and martyrdom. As Christians we can probably say that we owe a good part of our particular faith expression to the fact that Stephen was stoned to death for expressing his own faith. There is something about martyrdom, especially when it is done with the self-sacrificing and forgiving spirit that Stephen is described as having in our first reading from Acts today that has a cathartic effect on those around. Resolve is heightened. Objectives and goals seem to find extra strength. But martyrdon did not end with Stephen. In fact, Stephen is but the first of many thousands of people who have been martyred for expressing and living their Christian faith. But of course, martyrdom is not limited to the Christian faith. Martyrdom, if anything is more prominent in today's world than it was during the infancy of the Christian church. As much as we want to condemn the practice, and consider them as evil acts of violence, suicide bombers are martyrs for their own particular brand of faith. In the light of that fact, any glow that martyrdom might have had is lost, I think. And that is to say nothing of actions that create martyrs as well. Where have you heard the word martyr mentioned in the recent news? Yes, the death of Osama Bin Laden has been described as such for the misguided followers of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I don't know about you, but that puts the whole issue of martyrdom in a much different light – not something I haven't considered before, but certainly amplified by recent events and the reactions to it, including my own.

What this all does of course is create a situation where we are required to ask the question: What if scripture leads us to believe one way when everything else – tradition, reason and experience would suggest the opposite. What takes priority? What is the final authority? Many in the Christian community, probably John Wesley as well, would answer that question by saying “Scripture”. What that answer does not say, however, is how we are supposed to interpret scripture. Is it possible to discern an unqualified truth in scripture? Are we to consider it without any background as to the time of its writing, why it was written, who wrote it, and how it might contradict other writings which are to be considered as equally important. The fact is that no one can intepret scripture in a vacuum. It is always done in the context of experience, tradition and reason whether the interpreter chooses to name them as elements in the process or not. And so, given that it happens anyway, should we not be explicit in naming how they influence what we get from a given passage of scripture. And should we not be free to say that reason, experience and tradition are such that either scripture is not to be considered with the same authority that many would claim or that the meaning of any given portion of it is much less sure than we might have thought.

My experience, and aspects of my tradition and my reason want to name the passage we read from John today as not descriptive of the way of God. Every cell in my body, everything I have been able to discern about the way God would have us follow, and in fact what I have discerned of the essence of Jesus' life and ministry would say the same thing – namely that Jesus as the exclusive and only right way to determine the Way, Truth and Light is wrong. I don't believe in an exclusive version of the Christian faith. It is far too triumphalistic, far too narrow minded, far too limiting for me as a description of the way that God wants us to live. In fact, the very triumphalist, exclusive nature of Christianity – which undoubtedly is part of its past and unfortunately a good part of its present – I heard it as recently as during one of the Lenten lunch reflections – is in my mind the exact opposite of the path that God is calling us to follow.

The history of the world is riddled with the stories of those who claimed they had a grasp on the ultimate truth and the only way to faithful. The news was full of such claims yesterday and it bothers me to even mention it because the story (and I hope you know what I am talking about without me having to mention it more specifically) got far too much airing on the media as it was.

The Christian faith is going through a pretty tough time right now and I would say that in large part it is because of the narrow and uncompromising characteristics that some within the Christian community are using to describe it. What bothers me is that the open, inclusive, thoughtful and accepting branches of the Christian faith seem so often to be left on the margins. The fact is that these aspects have always been a part of Christianity. It's not something new. It is ever a part of the tradition which others seem to think is theirs alone. It bothers me that some would claim a return to the traditional aspects of the Christian faith, as if they long for a time when it was only this narrow, uncompromising, doctrinally based place of faith. No, it never was so clearly and narrowly defined. I could just as easily pine for a return to the open, inclusive, accepting and well reasoned traditions as well. I don't pine for them, however, because I know they have always been a part of what the Christian faith is about, they are part of what it means to be people of the Way. And my vision is forward – girded by tradition, confirmed by experience, assured by reason and prodded and poked, inspired and annoyed, deepened and angered, by scripture.

I learned at seminary that is okay and within the tradition to preach against scripture – either way – whether as an assurance of the way we could be, or as something that leads us to make other claims – scrpiture is a source of inspiration. And so there it is – sometimes scripture leaves us between a rock and a hard place, but my ancestors were also there and their faith led us to where we are today – with the freedom to use our brains and our hearts, our experience and intellect to spend time trying with all the earnestness we can muster to learn what it means for us to follow God's way. As the hymn says: Seek We First the Kindom of God. Amen.