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Summer Series Week Six
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Thank goodness how often we wash our hands and whether or not people should be blowing out birthday candles. It's actually shaping our ecclesiology. Right? Welcome to
Speaker 2:the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Hi, everyone. Welcome to church. For those of you I haven't met in person, socially distanced or not, my name is Scott, and I am part of our team here Commons, and we are so honored to be sharing these moments with you. It's no small matter that you've taken some time to wake up today and turn on your device and find us here, and yes, we realize that's the minimum requirement these days because we gather today from playrooms and couches and decks and vacation spots, even other countries, which is so awesome, which is why we appreciate that you still make the effort to join us here. There's something unique about this group of people watching today brought together around the story of Jesus.
Speaker 1:So thank you for being here. Now we are more than halfway through our summer series, Speaking Sunday. September is coming up, friends, and with it, a new start for our next year of conversation together, and we are excited about that. But for a few more weeks still, we are taking words that play a role in our faith tradition. Some of them you might be super familiar with, and others maybe not so much.
Speaker 1:And we are taking these words, and we're deep diving them a little and turning them over and around, and in the process leaning into new ways of seeing them and also seeing the world. Because the words we use matter. They betray our assumptions. They hint at our aspirations. They mark the boundaries of our thinking, but they can also be doorways into change and growth and freedom.
Speaker 1:And we hope that you're experiencing that a little in these conversations, which we are gonna jump back into in just a second. But first, let's pause for a moment, center ourselves, pray with me now. Loving God, we are present now to the gift of community gathered together from all of these different places. And whatever season of life we find ourselves, whatever the time and days we find ourselves in right now, whatever those are marked by, we come together. We turn our heart and our face towards each other into community in the ways that we can.
Speaker 1:And we ask that you would help us as, again, we take a step toward what it means to be community. We take a step again towards what it means to follow you into the world and help to make all things new. Be with us now. We ask in the name of Christ. Amen.
Speaker 1:Alright. So our word for today is ecclesiology. And as far as a road map goes, for those of you filling in the last few pages of the current journal, we've got a chat today about images, our shared work, and a new rule. And, yes, for those of you really paying attention, this is in fact the longest word in the series. And if I ask some of you to spell it right now, you would probably start sweating.
Speaker 1:Right? No worries. There's no test at the end of this sermon. The truth is that this word in particular sounds pretty theological, so we need to start quick with a definition. Basically, ecclesiology is the study of the church.
Speaker 1:What it is, what it isn't, what it looks like, how it organizes itself. And therefore, ecclesiology is a description of how the church sees itself. And the word comes from the Greek term ecclesia, which some of you may have heard before, and we'll return to that in a sec. But first, let's take a look at a snippet of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians as a lens for this conversation. Because in chapter three, we see Paul forming some first century ecclesiology.
Speaker 1:The context is this. The stories of Jesus' life were starting to circulate around the Mediterranean, and the earliest disciples were still trying to figure out what all this meant as they found themselves caught up in the dynamics of empire and commerce and how to organize themselves in the face of it all. And Paul writes to some of them in the bustling economic center of Corinth to the church there. And after encouraging them to not get caught up declaring alliances and splitting into camps against each other, he tells them in verse nine simply, for we are God's coworkers in God's service. You are God's field, God's building.
Speaker 1:And listen. Our jumping off point with this small verse is just this, that here, Paul is using imagery to define what the church might be. He's naming himself and other leaders as coworkers and imagining these gatherings of early Christians in Corinth, made up of Jew and Gentile, former soldiers and wealthy merchants, skilled workers, politicians, and beggars. Paul says to this group, I see you as a ripened field that displays God's faithfulness, and I see you as a long sought place of safety in the world. And when Paul uses these images, he articulates a simple ecclesiology, an explanation, an anticipation, an assertion of what the church is supposed to look like and be in the world, which interestingly is what theologians note is true about our ideas of the church today, that they're influenced by the varying forms of the church.
Speaker 1:And this has always been true. This is why in the first few centuries after Jesus' life, early Christian thinkers and writers always saw the church as a small enclave holding on against a monstrous empire. But then Christianity became the religion of the empire, and the church and the state now connected were seen as a victorious and imperial kingdom. The emperor became the church's defender, and over the next few centuries, the church would be imagined as the bearer and bringer of God's judgment and punishment. It would be seen as the school of truth, a gathering of God's pupils.
Speaker 1:Then, of course, it was seen as a special society or community governed by strict laws and discipline. And we see language like priesthood of all believers and the people of God emerge to describe the church, and all kinds of hierarchical structures based on the authority of church leaders came with it. Which is just to say, on one hand, that the church has been trying to understand itself for a long time. But then on the other, that you and I are always learning to understand ourselves too. And regardless of whether we're super familiar with the Christian tradition or not, we have been shaped by the images and ecclesiologies around us for better or worse.
Speaker 1:I mean, think of the metaphors you'd use to describe your religious experience or your encounters with church. Maybe the church was a community for you. Maybe it was a school for your sense of wonder. But then maybe for some, it was more like a prison or what felt like a failed experiment. And along the way, as you've developed and tried to understand yourself in relationship to God and who might God might be, maybe maybe you were hurt.
Speaker 1:Maybe those experiences left you wondering if the church was worth your time. If your connection to the divine was helped at all by being around this thing. And sorting through that can be hard work. All of us have likely done some soul searching trying to decide if the story of Jesus is worth the cost of admission that the church sometimes seems to level. And maybe that's work you feel you're doing right now.
Speaker 1:And wherever you are, I think Paul's metaphors for the gathering of Christ's followers can be helpful. Because in their simplicity, they invite you to consider that the ways you've been wounded, the ways that you weren't welcomed, the ways that you felt the walls closing in even as you changed and grew and shifted. Those experiences aren't symptoms of something wrong with you. No. Those were and are failures of the church's imagination.
Speaker 1:Those are pictures of faith that you were never meant to internalize or follow. And Paul's language of coworkers and fields fields and buildings offers us hints that can guide us toward the right images of ecclesiology for ours and the world's future where we ask, would I use the word mutuality to describe what I see the church sharing with its communities? Do I imagine the church as a fertile field bursting with life and flourishing? Could the church actually be a place of refuge, a destination of welcome, a place where the longing for home at the core of our being might finally find some rest? And where the answers we offer to those questions, and maybe, just maybe, the new metaphors we form to describe what we think the church could be, where these join with the ancient efforts that formed church and scripture, translating them into images that light our homes and our hearts and our neighborhoods in new ways.
Speaker 1:Now with this invitation to imagination in hand, let's jump back to this word ekklesia quickly because this is the Greek term translated into English as church more than a 140 times in the Christian scriptures. And what's curious is why? Because this was a generic term in the first century. It just referred to any assembly or gathering of people, not unlike a word like meeting for us, which I think we'd all admit is a term that we understand with more nuance now than we did in February, for example, given that Zoom with all of its muting machinery debacles is now just part of our lexicon and that most of us would be very quick to differentiate between another Zoom call and actually meeting somebody in person because not all meetings are the same. The point is that this word ekklesia was just a broad descriptor.
Speaker 1:It didn't mean church because churches didn't exist yet. The word originated in ancient Greek society referring to the assembly of male citizens called out or summoned together to debate and struggle and work together in order to make decisions. And every significant Greek city had an ekklesia. But by the time that Paul and other early Christian writers start to use this word four hundred years later, ecclesia had just come to mean any gathering of people, which is why to distinguish gatherings of Jesus' disciples from professional guilds and synagogues and the rotary club because certainly they had something like that, I'm sure. Paul addresses his letter to the church or ecclesia or gathering of God in Corinth.
Speaker 1:Those sanctified in Christ Jesus called to be God's holy people. And I love this, how the church's earliest vocabulary to describe itself is generic, how the earliest ecclesiology saw the church as a gathering because that's been part of my experience of the church. You know, coffee, liturgy, and the joy of being together, the important stuff. But, increasingly, I've come to see the church as a generic collection of extraordinary people, teachers and executives and health care workers, artists and lawyers and parents and students and electricians and accountants and therapists and baristas all summoned from the profound work you do every day to be honest and fair and to help and called from the places where you care and you advocate and you serve, called together in our shared work, a gathering of those struggling together toward a better future, where your everyday vocation and effort in the way of Jesus out there is what makes the church unique, where our gathering might look just like any other group or association, your selflessness and labor and imagination in the service of a bigger and brighter story reveal that the church is anything but generic. So thank you.
Speaker 1:And yet, we sit here and we're talking about these things in such a unique time, where pandemic life has done more than change our vacation plans, and thank goodness how often we wash our hands and whether or not people should be blowing out birthday candles. It's actually shaping our ecclesiology. Right? I mean, some of us are experiencing church today as a virtual space, while others gather in a masked socially distanced one. And I imagine that for almost all of us who call commons our community, our imagination for what church was is being strained by the awkwardness of what it has to be right now and the uncertainty of what it might be in the coming months.
Speaker 1:And just like we talked about a minute ago, our experience right now is likely shaping our theology. And for some of us, this is exciting because it's different, it's new, and the challenge makes you come alive. But for others, maybe you have some feelings of distance and disconnection and even confusion as you try to find new rhythms and practices in this season. And just like I invited you to imagine new images for your ecclesiology a second ago, I want to invite us into a bit of a thought experiment today about this moment for us as a community. Because it's not as though the church hasn't faced the prospect of needing to pivot and reorganize before.
Speaker 1:Let's be honest. Economic change and political unrest and global pandemics have challenged the church throughout history, and I wanna suggest that we take up a historical practice made most famous by Saint Benedict during the social upheaval of sixth century Italy, this practice of adopting a rule or pattern of life to move forward. A practice of setting intention together in a time of disconnection where, in our case, maybe you and I could imagine a rule or a pattern for pandemic community where we grapple and we come to grips with the limitations of this moment on who we've been. And instead of letting frustration discourage us, and instead of letting inertia of social distance carry us away from each other, instead of giving into apathy and cynicism, What might happen if we set out together in search of new beauty and connection and wonder? And here's the deal.
Speaker 1:Saint Benedict's rule and the rules of so many communities since at their core, they're just simple statements of shared values. A community rule maps the aspirations of any like minded group because, as has been noted by Benedictine scholars, the bonds of community life have to be tended with great care. So let me get us started thinking about what it looks like to reimagine our life together, being intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, and centered on Jesus. And I've framed my rule as a series of affirmations. And maybe sometime today or even as we're watching together, you wanna make a list of your own.
Speaker 1:Here goes. I affirm that to be intellectually honest is a choice to be flexible, quick in admitting my mistakes and my blind spots in a world full of conflict, willing to embrace careful thought and patient learning and humble positions, choosing curiosity instead of cynicism. I've felt pandemic life pushing me to take mental shortcuts, and I wanna push back at this. I affirm that to be spiritually passionate, I must become a curator of well lived life. Resisting the ways that pandemic life has undermined my ability to be grateful and recommitting myself to creative expression and active solidarity, trusting that love is best seen live and local, admitting that relationships are a telling barometer of my faith and that they are always the truest measure of community and that my investment in them is divine work.
Speaker 1:Moving toward constructing my cohorts and sharing my spaces and cultivating new habits to include others in a distanced world. And I affirm that to be Christ centered paradoxically is to always be moving outward beyond the imagination of church that I can't go back to, trusting the spirit's work out in the world in a host of secular liturgies, assuming the best in others, looking for the image of Jesus in everyone I meet, and growing in how I carry the story of things made new beyond our limited gatherings into service, friendship, and justice. And, of course, friends. These are only just hints at a pattern or rule for a pandemic community that you might adopt. I I'm hoping that I just kinda got the ball rolling.
Speaker 1:Because if, as one theologian contends, the real church is first and foremost a happening, a fact, a historical event, well, if that's true, then our ecclesiological potential is endless. Where you and I enact the Church in every small affection we extend, in every quiet and unseen gesture, working together in simple efforts made to mark the world with paths of hope, that if Paul was right, these paths lead to a flourishing garden and welcoming home for everyone. Let's pray. God, we sit here gathered together in the mystery of what it means to be your church. And to be quite honest, that mystery sort of confounds us even at the best of times.
Speaker 1:But now in this moment where so much of who we've been and so much of how we've been able to live in the world together, it feels like we're distanced from that. We're stretched from it, and we're having to be imaginative. And I pray that you would help us to receive this moment as gift and that you would give us courage to follow you step by step, choice by choice, action by action into the future that's an unfolding of your great goodness still made real for this world we live in. We're so grateful for the traditions we hold, for the ways their wisdom helps us today. And with these, we ask that your spirit would inspire us to new spaces and new life together for the sake of Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Well, thanks for being with us here today online. It's always so good to be together. And as always, we leave you with the blessing to love God, love people, and tell the story. We hope if you have a moment that you can jump into the Zoom lounge with us.
Speaker 1:Our staff will be there as always ready and available to connect and offer you prayerful space. The link for that is in the description of this video. And with that said, peace everyone.