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Brad Jersak writes:
“What is God like? Toxic images abound: God the punishing judge, the deadbeat dad, the genie in a bottle—false gods that need to be challenged.
But what if, instead, God truly is completely Christlike? What if His love is more generous, his Cross more powerful, and his gospel more beautiful than we’ve dared to imagine? What if our clearest image of God is the self-giving, radically forgiving, co- suffering Love revealed on the Cross? What if we had ‘A More Christlike God’?”
That’s it. That’s our imagination as a church. To become a community that looks like Jesus, so that we can serve a God who looks like Jesus, and prepare to participate in a kingdom that looks just like Jesus. As we launch into our second year together as Commons Church we want to take the start of the season to refocus our community, theology, and participation on Jesus.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
It's launch weekend. And so we are doing this three times today for the very first time. But it's incredible to look back on where we've come from in the last twelve months together as Commons Church. I know that you're here, and so you probably already know at least some of the story, but it's worth rehearsing if for no other reason than just to say thank you one more time. Because a year ago this Sunday, we started with our very first Sunday here on a Sunday morning, and we packed the place out.
Speaker 1:Over 300 people joined us on our first week. And so the very next week, we went to two services. We added a 7PM service, and that one filled up too. And so here we are today doing it three times. But over the past twelve months, we have served approximately 10,000 coffees and lattes.
Speaker 1:We served over 3,000 pancakes at our breakfast, stampede breakfast this summer. We had over 450 people join us in one Sunday to celebrate resurrection on our first Easter. We've had over a 120 people take the membership course or become members in our first year. We started over 20 home churches that meet throughout the city, and we've expanded now to eight people on staff in some capacity. So it's been amazing.
Speaker 1:And I'm really proud of this one. So far, as a church, we have sent just over $45,000 outside of our doors to support missional organizations that are serving those in need around the globe, and I promise we are just getting started with that one. This year Yes. Thank you. Amazing.
Speaker 1:This year, we're committed to making sure that 50 new kids get sponsored and cared for in the Kalende community in Zambia we support. We have committed to making sure that at least one refugee family from Syria gets to Canada, gets to Calgary, gets housing and medical care and food, and gets on their feet here in this amazing country that we get to live in. We've committed to supporting a field office in Thailand through International Justice Mission, so that we can make sure that people who are born into the hill tribes of that country get their citizenship papers and their proper legal rights in their country. We're committed to doing our part to end homelessness here in the city. We've got some exciting new projects, a new pilot project we're putting together with the Calgary Homeless Foundation that will have more info about this fall.
Speaker 1:We are committed as a church to acknowledging our debt to First Nations peoples. As we meet here on Blackfoot territory and Treaty Seven lands in the Kensington community every Sunday. But all of that comes because we are committed together to the renewal of all things. By working alongside this God who we believe looks like Jesus. And so that conviction, that God looks like Jesus, this is where we want to begin year two together.
Speaker 1:And so we've got some great stuff planned. It's in your journals. Please grab one before you go. They're free and they will help you chart the next year with us. But the focus in this central conviction of the Christian faith is what starts us off this year together.
Speaker 1:That we see God most clearly when we look at Jesus. And I get it. Right? We're Christians. Or at the very least, we're exploring Christianity.
Speaker 1:I mean, we walked into a church, didn't we? Of course, Christ is at the center. It's right there in the name. It's like mister Lou. Right?
Speaker 1:You don't know there for lunch. You know what you're getting into. You go to Mucho Burrito when you want lunch because you get a burrito with extra guacamole and cilantro like a civilized person. And if you don't like cilantro, I can't talk to you. But anyway And yet, still, it's sometimes still hard to know what Jesus would do even if we bought the bracelet.
Speaker 1:So that's where we want to start this year. What does it mean to be convinced that God really does look like Jesus? There's this passage in the Psalms where God is indicting a lot of the sin, a lot of the arrogance that he sees in his people. And so, talks about how they lie, how they cheat. He talks about how they slander even their mothers, he says.
Speaker 1:Remember that. God does not like your mama jokes. But, this is what he says at the end of it all. When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. That's kind of the problem, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Sometimes we begin to think that God is exactly like us. If we're honest, sometimes the incarnation, Jesus, makes that even harder to escape. And what if God was one of us? Like a slob like one of us. Just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home.
Speaker 1:It's true though. Joan Osborne was right. God did become one of us. But, when I start to think that that means that God thinks about politics the way I think about politics. Or that God is as interested in money as I am interested in money.
Speaker 1:If I begin to think that that means that God cares about whether the Calgary Flames win or not because I care about those things, or if I begin to think that God's compassion ends where my attention deficit kicks in, or my pragmatism takes over, then I have a problem. Because God became one of us, but not exactly like one of us. And so for the next three weeks, as we begin this second year together, what we wanna do is look at three very common images of how we sometimes think God looks. And then we wanna explore the ways in which Jesus challenges that imagination. And so today, it's the generic God.
Speaker 1:That loving and yet somehow detached God sitting on his cloud like a senile grandpa in the sky. Jesus says to us, no. God is deeply present and specific, and that's what's beautiful. Next week is the power God. The God that we worship because he's bigger and stronger than us.
Speaker 1:This is the God who can do whatever he wants, we might say. And yet Jesus comes to us and says, no. God is not worthy because of his power. God is worthy of our worship because he is love. That's what defines God.
Speaker 1:And then finally, as we close this series, we wanna talk about the comfortable God. This is the God who wants you above all else to be happy all the time. Because I think Jesus frees us from the tyranny of believing that God wants us to be happy all the time. I know that might sound odd at first, but of course, God wants you to have joy and celebration. He wants goodness to win the day.
Speaker 1:But God is also the God who suffers with us, and from us, and for us. And so when you hurt, when you're sad, when you're sick, when you're weak, this is not necessarily because you're the problem. Jesus comes to us and says, no, God is with you even when you hurt. Even when you're not happy, more than that, God hurts when you hurt. Yes, of course, he wants joy, but pain doesn't mean God has left the building.
Speaker 1:And so that's our agenda for the next three weeks. The God who looks like Jesus. Not the generic God, not the power of God, not the God of comfort. So, let's start with prayer today. Spirit of God, we welcome you into this space today.
Speaker 1:Not only into our conversation this morning, but into our imagination and our anticipation of the coming year. We are so incredibly thankful and grateful for the ways that you've been with us in the past twelve months. And so, as we begin again, a whole new year together, we would ask for your guidance, and your grace, and your spirit. Help us to gather, and to grow, and to move towards you in the next twelve months. May we create space, not only in our pews, but also in our minds, in our hearts, in our homes for those who would join in this conversation.
Speaker 1:And help us God. At the same time, to be moved by your compassion to give and to serve and to help wherever we can in the world. We know that you are not the generic God of fuzzy feelings, distant and disconnected from your world. And so instead, we trust that you are deeply invested in each of us as individuals, in our shared spaces, as communities, and in our contribution to the unfolding story of your kingdom. For those of us here in this room today, who have only ever known you as an idea or a concept or an argument, we would ask that your spirit would be with us today, breathing life and wholeness and intimacy into our spirits.
Speaker 1:May we know you as intimately as we know ourselves. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Now, today we wanna take on this idea of a generic God. This is the God who probably has a very nice long white beard.
Speaker 1:The God who probably long ago gave away his lightning bolts or at least put them in the closet because he had a good day. He traded them in for a cosmic vending machine that spits out blessing on request if only we can learn to ask politely and use them as it were to please. And even that, in fact, might be too specific. You know, the old idea of a man in the sky might be outdated. Perhaps, we're simply just talking about an impersonal energy.
Speaker 1:A force in the universe that dispassionately dispenses gifts, if only we place them diligently on our vision boards. I'm being cynical here a bit. That's not really fair. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a vision board. Nothing wrong with visualizing where we want to be or who we want to become.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's actually a really good practice. But if our imagination of the divine has been so reduced to the point that God is nothing more than a personal growth tool, there's really not much divinity left in there. At the same time, I do get how we ended up here. We live in a very pluralistic society, and I actually happen to think that is part of the beauty in living in Canada. But there is a sense sometimes that pluralism should mean lowest common denominator.
Speaker 1:I mean, what do we all have in common? When we're in the public sphere, all we should talk about is the stuff that we share with each other. And well, all religions tend to say that we should be nice to each other. All religions tend to say that God likes us. All religions tend to say that there are certain things that God wants to reinforce through blessing.
Speaker 1:Perhaps that's all God should ever be. A nice candy dispensing grandpa in the sky. Who would ever object to that? And yet, that's not actually pluralism because there's no plurality there. That's artificial monotony.
Speaker 1:And the truth is it just tastes bland. Let me give you an example. And do remember back in the day, there used to be Nabob and Folgers and Maxwell House? Probably still exists somewhere in the back of your cupboard. I'm sure those companies do still exist selling their awful coffee powders to unsuspecting customers.
Speaker 1:But what they did was this. They took coffee beans from wherever they could get them all over the world, and then they would roast them, and over and over, and roast them so dark that most of the taste of any particular bean would be covered up by that dark roasting flavor. And then they would mix them with chemicals, so they didn't ever spoil, and then they would grind them down into instant coffee, and then they would put them on the shelves, and they would wait for years until someone got desperate enough to just try it. And they did this on such a massive scale across the globe, that the whole mission of a company like Folgers was to make sure every cup of coffee tasted exactly the same. How it tasted was probably not all that important.
Speaker 1:The fact that it tasted the same was. Now, eventually, we all know this, Starbucks comes along and they up the coffee game. They started charging $3 for a cup of coffee. And everyone who drank Folgers thought this is nuts. I can buy a whole can of coffee for I mean, I have no idea what a can of Folgers is worth, but probably less than $3.
Speaker 1:And the Starbucks people started making fun of the Folgers people for drinking bad coffee, and the Folgers people started thinking that the Starbucks people had lost their minds for paying that much. And we all see where this is going. Right? Because the coffee arms race has continued to proliferate, And there are, of course, now people who think of the Starbucks people the same way the Starbucks people think of the Folgers people. Now granted, I am one of those geeks in the third camp.
Speaker 1:I actually frequent a website called coffeegeek.com to keep my nerdy credentials up to date. There's a lot of new research that's happening in the field of coffee these days. But, what's been fascinating to watch in the post Starbucks era is to see cafes and coffee roasters who have actually specifically, intentionally built their business around the distinctive flavor of a particular bean, or a specific region, or a certain process that they're gonna use to make your coffee. And instead of trying to make every cup of coffee the same when you go into that cafe, what you will get intentionally is a single origin roast. That's here for a week and then on.
Speaker 1:Where one cup is built upon the unique flavor of that bean from Guatemala or Costa Rica or Ethiopia. Now, not only is this fascinating if you're a coffee geek, but actually, the distinctiveness of this experience is built on the idea that that's what makes it compelling. This cup will be different than the last. One of the things that we've talked about here at Commons is the vision to be an intellectually honest, spiritually passionate community that takes Jesus seriously. Now, that's not the way to approach Christianity.
Speaker 1:We are only one among an amazing group of churches here just in the city of Calgary. But, that's our way. That's what we do. And, it is not necessarily going to before or even trying to before everyone. It's unique.
Speaker 1:It's local. It's single origin. Now, what if religion itself was always meant to be that way? Yes, of course, there are things that we share with all the great religions, And we should celebrate those things. We should use them as touch points to join in conversation with each other and learn.
Speaker 1:But what makes Christianity beautiful for me is Christ. There was a book, a great book put out a couple years ago by an agnostic religious studies professor named Stephen Prethero. And the book is called rather provocatively, God is not one. And what Prederot does as an agnostic is work through each of the eight major religions on the planet. And he does this in order to show not how they're the same, but how radically different from each other they are.
Speaker 1:And what's really interesting is that the premise for his book is that the only way we can ever learn to get along with each other is not by pretending we're the same. It's actually by learning to understand where we're different and celebrate the uniqueness of that. See the problem is this, that as a Christian, if I say, at their core, all religions are really all the same. What I mean by that is, all religions are like mine. If I say all religions are the same, what I'm really saying is all religions see the world the way that I do.
Speaker 1:And that's just not true. Because Judaism is telling us something about God. And Islam is telling us something about God. And Buddhism is telling us something about God, but they're different. And so to live authentically in a pluralistic society is all about working to know our own story and our conviction so well that we can acknowledge our differences, and then we can use that as a platform to celebrate what we learn from each other and where we are the same.
Speaker 1:Here's the problem though. If all we know is that generic feel good, lowest common denominator God, vending machine in the sky God, then we're worse off for it. Because we don't know our own story. Let me read you a scripture. And if you've been around church for a while, this is one that you have probably heard at some point in your journey.
Speaker 1:It's John chapter 14 starting in verse six. Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you really know me, then you will know my father as well. From now on, you do know him, and you have seen him.
Speaker 1:Now, this is, for my money, one of the most beautifully iconic and profound statements of Jesus found anywhere in the scriptures. I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and it's beautiful. And yet, if you've been around church, you have probably also heard this statement used as a weapon before too. One of the things that I get the opportunity to do from time to time is participate in interfaith dialogues. And so maybe at the university or some other place, I'll get invited to come and sit on a panel and discuss the differences and some of the points of contact between Christianity and say Islam or Judaism.
Speaker 1:And all the time, someone will come up to me after these and they will say, how do you participate in something like that? I mean, Jesus is the way. No one comes to the father but through him. As a Christian, of course, I want to affirm that. You know, my Lord said it.
Speaker 1:But as a human being who's drawn to the process of learning and discovery, who wants to hear and digest other people's stories, I don't want the conversation to end there either. And so the problem seems to be that we either take Jesus' words and we use them as a way to shut down conversation, or we take Jesus' words and we kind of, sort of, subtly toss them aside in favor of something less direct. Neither of those seem like good options to me. And so what we need to do, think, is look more closely at these titles that Jesus is giving himself. What's he trying to say here?
Speaker 1:And I know that in English, a lot of translations, most will say, the way, the truth, the life. And we put a lot of weight on the in English. Now, what you have to realize though, is in Greek, there is no indefinite article. So in English, we have a and we have the and we use them very differently. In Greek, there is just the.
Speaker 1:And they put the in front of everything. For example, if I wanted to say, that carpet is purple and it's beautiful. First I would be lying, but I would say it this way. That, the carpet, the purple, the beautiful. That's how Greek works.
Speaker 1:And so without going into a major explanation of Greek grammar, there are a lot of scholars, probably even most, that would suggest what Jesus is doing here. He's actually giving himself titles. Or maybe another way to put it is this. He's explaining what he now brings to these ideas. See, works like this.
Speaker 1:In the old testament, way, truth, and life are incredibly important ideas for the Hebrew peoples. In Deuteronomy, the Jews are told, you shall not turn to the right or to the left. You must follow exactly the path or the way that the Lord your God has commanded you. Same word there in in the Septuagint. It's in Greek.
Speaker 1:It means way or path. And Jesus says, I am the So, it's not a set of rules, he's saying. It's not a set of directions. It's not a map. That's not what you've been searching for.
Speaker 1:The way is a person, and that person is me. Here's a way to think of it. This is the difference between someone asking, how do I get to Commons Church? And you say to them, well, drive down 10th, and then you turn right onto Kensington Road. And then you follow that almost until you reach Crowchild, and it'll be on your right.
Speaker 1:Easy. You can't miss it. You're fine. It's the difference between that and you saying, well, let's go. I'll take you there.
Speaker 1:The way that the Jews have been searching for. Jesus says that is no longer a set of directions. Way is now a relationship with me. Truth is all over the Hebrew scriptures. Psalm 86 says this, teach me your way, oh Lord, that I may walk in your truth.
Speaker 1:You can already hear those connections in Hebrew thought between truth and way and walking. But the thing is, a truth can be a concept. Right? We see that all over the place, or truth can actually be an embodied reality that we live with our choices. So there is a big difference between someone who says, same sex marriages are destroying the sanctity of life, but has also been divorced three times and doesn't see any irony with that.
Speaker 1:And someone who quietly, humbly, loves unconditionally, all while keeping their convictions true. Jesus says, the only kind of truth that matters is embodied truth. Truth is an idea. Truth is a concept. Truth is some abstract thing, ethereal that sits outside of us.
Speaker 1:That now gives way to truth as a living expression of life. That's why Jesus gets claim on our lives. That's why Jesus is a way that's worth following because he takes ideas and he puts now breath and skin and humanity behind them. And they become embodied. They become lived.
Speaker 1:They become alive. Psalm 16 says this, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures eternal. Have you ever heard someone say something like this?
Speaker 1:I never really lived until I bought a motorcycle. This is true. It's a lot of fun. I had mine for about ten years now. Tons of fun.
Speaker 1:Maybe they say something like this. I never really knew what life was about until I met my wife, or until my son was born, or I never knew what life was until I listened to Pearl Jam. And I don't mean just like heard it on the radio. I mean like put on good headphones and sat down intently and uninterrupted and spent hours just listening and absorbing that. It's important.
Speaker 1:You should try it. And sure, it's a little silly, but the reason we talk like that is because somehow we know deep in our spirit that new experiences open us up to life in new ways. And Jesus says that that inherent connection you make between experience and vitality, all of that, this searching, this experiencing, this living that you want to do, it points to me. So life is not just about breathing anymore. And life is not just about surviving another day anymore.
Speaker 1:Life is not just adding another week, another month, another year, no matter how much time you want to add to the end of your life. That's not life. Life is now experiencing connection and intimacy and relationship with God through Jesus. That's what he's saying. That's what living is.
Speaker 1:So Jesus is way, truth, he is life. And all of those things, we experience at some level simply because we're human. In fact, all of the Hebrew scriptures had been pointing people in the same direction for hundreds of years before Jesus came along. But now, in Jesus, God steps out of eternity and into history. And he takes these ideas we've been chasing and searching and looking for, and he makes them a way of living.
Speaker 1:A way of seeing and understanding. A way that constitutes what vitality and value mean now. And he says that these titles point not to a debate, not to an argument, not to anything that could be measured or compared, calculated, collated, or compared in an argument to anyone else, but instead to this divine connection between you and the God who would come to meet you wherever you are. Because way is now walking with Jesus. Truth is now embodying the grace of God.
Speaker 1:And life is now experiencing breath and vitality and relationship in new and surprising ways with the God of the universe who invests himself in your story. This is why that generic God of fluffy, fuzzy, positive emotions doesn't work in Christianity. Because the very center of our story says that God got specific. And so when I read someone like Eckhart Tolle write about this generic positive force in the universe, I find myself nodding and agreeing all the way through his book. He writes about how God is really the divine creative force that inhabits and animates each of us.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, yeah. Right on. I'm there with you. And I imagine Colossians chapter one, all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together.
Speaker 1:The problem is I get to the end and I'm often waiting, wondering where the final chapter is. Like, where's the part where that divine creative force that inhabits and animates each of us now becomes something more than that. Where it becomes way, and it becomes truth, and it becomes life for us. Because that's Christianity. The concept and thought would give way to relationship and being.
Speaker 1:And that's what's missing when we settle for the generic God of positive emotion. Because we serve a single origin God who is unique and specific. And that means we don't have to be antagonistic about this. It means, we can learn from other faiths and perspectives in some way. It means we don't have to carry an arrogant sense of completion into a conversation with us.
Speaker 1:It simply means that we acknowledge the unique identity of the Christian story. That the universe wants good for you, but that he wants a very specific, unique, and personal good for you. And so today, as we close this service and we launch ourselves into a new year together, that personal invitation to you is now uniquely presented to us in the table of Christ. The unique and the singular expression of the Christian community. Where our ideas about God become embodied in bread and wine that we eat, and we digest, and we take into ourselves.
Speaker 1:And maybe you've been part of Christian community for some time in your life. Maybe you've even been part of this community for some time. And it's been good. It's been helpful. It's even been profound in a lot of ways, but your experience of God has only ever remained conceptual.
Speaker 1:It's changed you, but it's stuck there. And it's never moved past that generic divine into an encounter with the God who loves you specifically and deeply. And trust me here, I have no interest in shaping that encounter for you. I I'm no interest in telling you what it needs to look like or how you should express it. Some of you, you're very in touch with your emotions, and that is part of your identity.
Speaker 1:It's part of your faith. Some of you are probably very cerebral like I am. Relationships, emotions, that's all kind of weird and you keep it at arm's line. God is present as we need him to be in all of that. And so I'm not interested in describing what your encounter with this specific God will look like.
Speaker 1:Because I believe that he is big enough and gracious enough and loving enough to be unique for you. But what I do want to do is provide an opportunity for you to come and to eat and to meet with the God who would become specific for you. And so before you come today to take and eat together, allow me to read familiar words from our book of worship. I invite you to come to this sacred table today, not because you must, but because you may. I invite you to come to this sacred table today to testify, not that you are righteous, but that you desire to love our Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:I invite you to come to this table, not because you're strong, but precisely because you are weak. Not because you have any claim on the grace of God, but because in your frailty and in your weakness, you stand in constant need of mercy and of help. I invite you to come to the sacred table today, not to express an opinion or an idea, but simply to invite God's presence and to pray for his spirit in your life. May way become relationship for you. May truth become personal to you.
Speaker 1:May life flow in new and surprising ways within you today. May God become specific for you.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.