Cote des Neiges anniversary
24 May 2013 p.m.
Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee
“‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven
sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. 9 Then have the
trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the
Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land.10 Consecrate the
fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It
shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to
your own clan.” Leviticus 25:8-10
We’re marking an anniversary this weekend, a 150th anniversary, no less. The midNineteenth Century was a great time to start churches, it would appear. Both my
congregation in Boston, and then the church in Trenton, celebrated their sesquicentennial
during my ministry. But before we begin this weekend let me ask the question of you: what
is the purpose of an anniversary?
Half a century ago, when I began my ministry, that
question didn’t need to be asked. An anniversary was a part of being a Presbyterian church,
particularly in Montreal. I recall some great anniversaries: Malcolm Campbell made quite a
show of them at First Church down on Jeanne Mance, calibrating the years since the St
Gabriel Church was founded in 1792.
In the early days of my ministry the question always came up in Session meetings:
Who can we get to speak at our anniversary this year? As the services brought our folks
from the rest of the presbytery as well as former members, the anniversary could be a
major fund-raiser – all the more important to get someone who could draw a crowd. But
today First Church, which morphed into Knox Crescent and Kensington and First has wisely
gone back to the original Kensington because its various permutations won’t mean much to
newcomers and non-Presbyterians in 2014. And I fear that many congregations don’t
celebrate the past because they are not sure they have a future. The times they are a
changin’, to quote Bob Dylan.
To answer that question – why do we have an anniversary – let’s be Biblical and go
back to Leviticus 25 and the Jewish practice of celebrating every fifty years a jubilee year,
“seven sevens of years and a jubilee” as we read, was to be marked by a special
commemoration. 8 “‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so
that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. 9 Then have
the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the
Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land.10 Consecrate the
fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It
shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to
your own clan.”
Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee was the title of a history of the first fifty years of
the Sudan Interior Mission, written by a great Canadian missionary Roland Bingham. It was
Bingham’s last testimony of God’s faithfulness to the mission he had founded, completed
and sent to the printer days before he died. It was composed in 1942 as the old order was
collapsing, Islam appeared to be triumphing, and the Christian faith appeared to be in
retreat everywhere. As he chronicled the advance of Canada’s largest faith mission he wrote
“The shortness of the time demands that we be up and living lives of holiness and serving
with passion and compassion, The day is at hand; let us rouse ourselves to see the sunrise.”
So he took the theme of jubilee and the summons of the trumpet that announced its
coming as a call to engagement and victory, not defeat, as I would today. Three sequences
of fifty, a new day, the past is behind us, the future bekons. His penultimate chapter was not
slow down but “Speed Up.”
So, what is an anniversary all about? Three emphases in Leviticus 25 stand out and I
hope we will make them ours this weekend:
(1) Celebration
The year of jubilee was a time of celebration, of acknowledging God’s faithfulness to
His people. The sound of the trumpet summoned Israel to a victory party. Much as Samuel
after the defeat of the Philistines had erected a stone between Mizpah and Shem calling it
Ebenezer, and announcing “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” (I Samuel 7:12)
We don’t hear much about celebration of our history in churches these days.
Instead, at least in the western world. we hear of defeat and surrender. Every jubilee year
Israel is summoned to mark God’s faithfulness as they look back over the previous fifty
years. “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life that I may dwell in the
house of the Lord forever.”
You have so much to celebrate in this congregation. Cote des Neiges has been a
beacon of light in a dying denomination. You have kept the faith. Your ministers have
provided consistent and godly teaching. Jake Kik, Hector MacRury, Ted McPhee, Bill
Manson, John Vaudry, and now Joel Coppieters. What a heritage!
(2) Forgiveness
The year of jubilee celebration began on the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of
Atonement. Many of you will appreciate the significance of Yom Kippur for your Jewish neighbors,
twenty-five hours of solemn repentance and fasting, a day given over to prayer and fasting. Yom
Kippur was a time to reflect on the past, on one’s relationship with God
In other words the year of jubilee began with reflection and penitence. Confession of sin was
at the heart of the instructions that Moses gave for the observance of the Day of Atonement: “on
this day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse you. Then, before the Lord, you will be clean
from all your sins.”
In our celebration of an anniversary there also needs to be humility. There is no place for
pride or arrogance: “Look what we have done, what we have accomplished.” Rather, as Jesus said in
the parable (Luke 17) “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say,
'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”
There was a lot of hubris in the old Presbytery of Montreal. When I was taken under care, at
the tender age of seventeen, there were fifteen thousand members. Today, there are less than three
and many (or most?) are not really viable and have an uncertain future. Cote des Neiges, because of
its historic identity with a strong Reformed and evangelical emphasis, is an exception among the
non-ethnic churches. But we need to confess, as well as celebrate. My prayer is that this anniversary,
as I call you back tomorrow morning to the simple gospel that has made this congregation spiritually
mighty, might rededicate ourselves to faithful obedience to the gospel: that Jesus Christ has come to
save sinners, of whom I am chief.
(3) Rootedness
There is a final feature of the year of jubilee that I would remind you of. In verse 10 we read:
“In the time of jubilee the Israelites were sent back to their roots: each of you is to return to your
family property and to your own clan.” And again in verse 13 “‘In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to
return to their own property.”
There were three levels to Jewish society in the Old Testament: there was your immediate
family, your clan, and your tribe. The year of jubilee was a time to go back to the ancestral land, to
reclaim your heritage, to discover who you are, your heritage, the faith of your fathers. Moses knew
that we all require roots if we are to have fruits. A fruitful person is a rooted person. That’s why
history is so important: where we are is determined where we have come from. We have a
responsibility to tell our children our story, as Israel was reminded. In the future, when your son asks
you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded
you?” 21 tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a
mighty hand. 22 Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible…”
We are in great danger in Canada today of losing our patrimony. How many times have you
heard someone say: “I wish I’d asked my father (or mother) about that before they died.” What are
we handing on to the next generation? Canada is suffering from a great deal of collective amnesia
Before it’s too late, tell your family what God has meant to you in the past, times that you have
drawn close to Him, people that have influenced you, lives that have been a model for you. For me
there are three people from Cote des Neiges that have affected my life greatly and that I would like
to leave with you as an encouragement on this anniversary Sunday.
Evelyn McArthur is an important person to you as well as to me. She left you, in her estate, a
large sum of money as a token of what this congregation had meant to her over the years. Evelyn
and her husband George took me in back in 1958 when I was summer student in Mille Isles in the
Laurentians. The year before I had boarded with the usual lady but she had taken a dislike to me so
the McArthurs took me in. At the end of the summer four people from the congregation were killed
in a horrendous car accident as they were coming back from holiday, near Rockland Ontario. Nearly
every family in that close knit community was affected and in the week before the funeral I was
called on to provide much pastoral care as George and Evelyn supported and prayed with me.
Basil Howell grew up among the Brethren but was powerfully affected by the preaching of
Hector MacRury here. He took early retirement from the Bell where he was Comptroller, qualified
for ordination, served briefly in Duvernay before becoming Comptroller of the Presbyterian Church
in Canada when it was in dire financial straits. We became close friends and his generosity largely
financed the Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada which we started on 8
May 1982. I shall never forget his love and prayer support in that great enterprise.
As I was preparing this talk I had a call from a friend of mine. Derek Patton came over to
Montreal in the 1950s to work in a bank off Victoria Park. He recounted how much the ministry ti
Hector MacRury meant to him as a young man and how formative his attendance at Cote des Neiges
had been for his future life and ministry. Derek, when he moved to Toronto to work for Scripture
Union was an assessor elder and a member of the first Kirk Session of Bridlewood Church and a man
on whom I depended in those early days of that Evangelical extension congregation in Scarborough.
Throughout Canada and the United States there are many such stories and I hope that this
weekend will be a chance for you to tell them and then, perhaps, encouraged by our time together
may pass them on to your children and their children, what the Lord has done.