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Ritual
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Well, good morning, though. Welcome to Commons. My name is Jeremy, if we haven't met yet. This is the last week in this series that we have called Ritual, where we are looking at some of the traditions of the Christian faith. And this is a bit of a different series for us because while we do have elements of traditional liturgy in our services almost every week, we are not part of what you might call a high church tradition.
Speaker 1:At the same time, however, we do important we do realize as important how deeply the patterns that we inhabit are. One of the things that gets tossed around a lot these days is the statement, I am spiritual but not religious. And I get that. I really do. That religion is one of those things that can become very quickly, if we're not careful, rote routine and meaningless repetition.
Speaker 1:But the truth is, religion is simply the collection of patterns and rituals we use to support our spirituality. It is the scaffolding, if you will, that helps us to build that divine spiritual connection to God that we all long for as human beings. So I am spiritual. And to be honest, as far as I'm concerned, that is just another way of saying that I'm human. But I am also deeply religious, because it's a pattern of being generous that makes me believe in generosity.
Speaker 1:And it's a ritual of prayer that helps me believe I am not alone in the universe. It's participation in community like this that helps me to understand I am essentially interdependent with everyone who crosses my path in life. And so religion is not the center for me, but it is part of what helps to point me to the center. Now next week, we begin a new series, our summer series in the poetry of the Psalms. And I'm looking forward to that as well, but we do have one last week here in ritual.
Speaker 1:And so I wanted to take a moment at least to look back at where we've been. Because in the first week of this series, Kevin was up here to talk about singing. And that made sense because Kevin is our worship arts pastor, and he heads up the army of musicians and volunteers that make music such an integral part of what we do here at Commons. But if you didn't realize this, that was also Kevin's first full professional Sunday morning sermon, and you never would have guessed that because he just did an incredible job with it. But he walked us through some of the reasons that music and singing, particularly collectively, has become such a significant part of the church tradition.
Speaker 1:And music is one of those things that unless you stop to think about it, you forget how really strange it is. When I was first a pastor at an urban church in Toronto, I worked with youth. And particularly, I worked with a lot of youth that didn't have a church background. So we did a lot of community programs to connect with kids, basketball camps and tournaments, that type of stuff. But when we actually started holding church services and bringing kids in, talking to them about Jesus and singing some songs together, it was hilarious to me because all of the kids would call the worship segment karaoke.
Speaker 1:And that was funny because they loved it. But I would get these kids that would come and they would tell me, Jeremy, I love church. I really like the karaoke part though. That part's great. And I was like, no, no, don't don't say that.
Speaker 1:It's not karaoke. And yet the more I thought about it, was like, well, it is a bunch of people singing slightly off key with a bunch of lyrics up on the screen. I mean, that's kinda karaoke. But the truth is, what we do here, when we come and we gather and we sing together, it is a very unique moment in our week. I know you sing in the car, and I know you sing in the shower when no one else is home.
Speaker 1:I understand. But I would hazard a guess that apart from Sunday, you very rarely gather even with friends, definitely not with strangers, and certainly not with people who just walked in off the street to sing a song together. The unique nature of this moment is part of what makes it so special. Now I realize that there's been a move in the past couple decades to transition worship music to a more radio friendly style, an attempt to make it seem more comfortable to us. I get the intent, but I think in a lot of ways that also misses the point.
Speaker 1:Because what we do here in church when we sing, it's not like anything else we do anywhere else. And so I'm not sure we should try to pretend that it is. When we come together and we proclaim what unites us, when we listen to others agree together with us, when we hear as others affirm the things we might be struggling to affirm for ourselves in that moment, when we listen and we add and we help to create an auditory metaphor for unity in diversity, this is a strange moment. And that is part of why it's so beautiful. So my vote is that we keep worship strange at least a little bit.
Speaker 1:And that brought us to prayer. And we can be honest, prayer is a bit strange as well. Are we trying to change God's mind? Are we trying to change our mind when we pray? I mean, how exactly does an interaction between the human and divine work in a conversation?
Speaker 1:And this is where I might suggest that the answer to that question is as unique as each of us here in this room. If we are all unique individuals, and if God has an infinite capacity for relationship, then there is room for you to find your groove in prayer. Joel mentioned it last week. But last year, we did a five part series on the Lord's Prayer. Five questions from Jesus' prayer that helped to guide our prayer life.
Speaker 1:How do I live with God at the center? How do I help to close the gap between heaven and earth? How do I trust for what I need only for today? Where do I need to let go, and where do I need to say no in my life? You can find that series online if you want to backtrack, but perhaps even working through those questions as you pray and reflect could be meaningful for you.
Speaker 1:And that brings us up to last week where we talked about confession, and I was up here. I was back. So let me just say that there is a confession we do before God where we find the forgiveness that he offers. We acknowledge our sin, and we come to know that we are forgiven. But then there is the confession that we offer to each other.
Speaker 1:Because sometimes, even when we are forgiven, there is also a need to have, as Beasley Murray called it last week, a representative of the Lord and cross speak forgiveness to us. Sometimes you know you are forgiven, and yet you still need to hear someone say it. I pray that you might find the safety and the vulnerability to hear those words spoken to you when you need them. Today, we have one last topic to tackle. But let's pray, and then we will jump into a conversation about spiritual gifts.
Speaker 1:God of all creation, in this week where we have recognized both World Refugee Day and National Aboriginal Day, We name and we acknowledge, we confess before you the sins that we are implicitly connected to. The ways we have gathered wealth to ourselves at the expense of others. The ways that we have hesitated to open not only our borders, but our hearts and our homes to those in need. We can't change the past, but we can ask for forgiveness. We can embrace the way of grace, and we can work to try again enlivened by the spirit.
Speaker 1:Remind us by that same spirit that welcoming others means welcoming you in person. That acknowledging mistakes and asking for grace, this is part of how you communicate your forgiveness to us. And we pray that we would not let ourselves be robbed of the hope and joy born of your mercy manifested in the people we meet, and we greet, and we welcome along our way. As we speak of our gifts today, all that you have entrusted to our care, may we sense the divine opportunity to give it all away. May we work for peace.
Speaker 1:May we create for beauty. May we contribute to the kingdom of God as best we can. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Alright.
Speaker 1:So I mentioned I wanna talk about the idea of spiritual gifts today, and this is a different type of topic than we have addressed so far in this series. But before we can even get going, we have to recognize this. That the phrase spiritual gifts with all the baggage that may or may not carry for you is actually not a particularly biblical idea. Paul uses the phrase once in Romans one eleven, and that is actually the only usage of the phrase in the Bible. If you remember back to that passage, which I don't really expect you to do off the top of your head, but we did address it in our last series in Romans.
Speaker 1:It's a passage where Paul seems to be talking primarily about encouraging and teaching the Roman church, not some mystical expression of charismatic manifestation. And you see, the thing is that neither the Hebrew or the Greek languages have a word that translates well into the English spiritual. Now there's a word, a spirit in both. It's a word ruach in Hebrew and panuma in Greek, and yes, you do pronounce the p in Greek. But those are nouns, and the relative adjectival forms are actually pretty rare.
Speaker 1:So spirit is a person in the scriptures, not a description. But then again, even today, we started with a discussion of spiritual but not religious. Again, I completely get it. I understand the intent. The thing is, the idea of spirituality just doesn't really show up in the Bible.
Speaker 1:And that's because the Hebrew culture that produced our Old Testament and the basis for our New Testament, these cultures didn't have this deep sacred secular divide that we do. Now, they had a concept of holiness, one that we sometimes lack. The idea of setting something aside specifically for the worship of God, that didn't mean that everything else was somehow devoid of divine presence for the Hebrews and the early Christians. Everything was spiritual. Listen to Paul in Colossians one here.
Speaker 1:The sun is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible. He is before all things, and in him, all things hold together. Here's Paul again in Acts 17. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth, and he does not live in temples built by human hands.
Speaker 1:He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. For in him, we live, we move, we find our being. As some of your poets have said, we are his offspring. So living, breathing, moving, choosing, all of this is enabled by God. All of this is spiritual.
Speaker 1:Now life could be directed at the divine, holy, or it could be directed away from God, sin. But the idea that something could be secular, that something could be divided off from God, this was essentially a foreign concept. If you live and you breathe and you move, this is because of the divine. And so as we begin to talk about spiritual gifts, my intent today is not really to talk about a narrow slice of religious manifestation. I actually want to try to broaden that conversation of how God has gifted, enabled, and breathed life into us back into all of the ways that all of us contribute to the collective expression that we call church.
Speaker 1:Now there are a couple scriptures I want to engage with today, but we'll root ourselves in one of the most infamous when it comes to these types of expressions in the church. That is first Corinthians chapter 12. Or starting in verse one, we read, now about the gifts of the spirit, and right here quickly, you can see what I'm talking about. These are not spiritual gifts, and not so much a category or a type of gift that Paul wants to talk about. He is talking about gifts, all gifts that are given by the spirit of God.
Speaker 1:If it comes from God, this is part of what we are speaking of. But about these gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you are pagan somehow or other, you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. Therefore, I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the spirit of God says, Jesus, be cursed. And no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:Now one note here. Just like we saw last week in James, it's not helpful to read this in a mechanistic way. Yes. People can lie. Yes.
Speaker 1:People can say things they don't really mean or even understand. It's not what Paul's talking about. What he's saying as he's about to begin a discussion about the gifts of the spirit and the way God works in our lives is that everything, regardless of whether it has been attributed to God, still needs to be measured and evaluated against our commitment, our understanding of Jesus. So saying the words Jesus is Lord is not the issue. The question is, when someone speaks, do you hear that Jesus is Lord?
Speaker 1:So the argument in this section goes something like this. You used to worship idols that didn't do anything. Now you worship a living God who speaks and moves through you. But that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of your mouth automatically comes from God. Now for a lot of us, that seems self evident.
Speaker 1:Right? Let me tell you, however, there is a strange intoxication that comes once we believe God is moving through us. He does that. I affirm that. I like to think I've experienced that in moments in my life.
Speaker 1:But sometimes, the more comfortable you get with the idea that God speaks through you, sometimes, if you're not careful, the harder it gets to tell the difference between your voice and his voice. Does what I say sound like Jesus is Lord? Or does it sound like I've got something really important to say? Does it sound like I've got some self promotion to do? Does it sound like I've got some great gift of Jeremy to bring to everybody?
Speaker 1:Because those are two very different things. And anyone who demands that you listen to them uncritically, this is not someone who speaks for God. In fact, a little later in this section, Paul uses the analogy of a body to say that everyone is equally important in community. All voices need to be heard and understood. He says, well, what if the foot said, because I'm not a hand, I'm not really part of the body?
Speaker 1:Or what if the ear said, because I'm not an eye, I don't really belong here. That would be absurd. Right? Well, the background here is that in Corinth, there was a temple known as the Asclepion. It was the temple to the god Asclepius, the god of healing and medicine.
Speaker 1:If you ever seen a a staff with a snake wrapped around it at a hospital, that comes from Asclepius. Story goes that he found a snake that was injured one day, and he nursed it back to health. And that snake then taught him all the secrets of healing and medicine. So there you go. Who knew?
Speaker 1:You could have skipped all those years of medical school, just befriended a snake in the forest. But when the temple in Corinth was excavated, what we found was a whole bunch of body parts. Now nothing gruesome, but what we found were plaster casts of different limbs. And what would happen was that people would make a cast of where they had been injured or hurt, and then these casts would be brought to the temple and left as a gift or a prayer of healing to the god, Iskallapius. That's the image in the background of Paul's metaphor here in first Corinthians, a pile of discarded body parts.
Speaker 1:So it's not just a call for unity and diversity. It's actually about our identity That dismembered parts, hands and feet and arms and legs, those aren't bodies. It's only together that they have an identity that identifies them as a body, as human. We need each other. That's his point.
Speaker 1:We only exist together. And so in this section, Paul is gonna talk about specific types of gifts. He's actually gonna lay out a list of things he wants to address here specifically in Corinth. But the larger context of what he's talking about, it flows from this image of interdependence. And it's grounded actually in his imagination of Trinity.
Speaker 1:He says, there are different kinds of gifts, but the same spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone, it is the same God at work. Now this is a rhetorical device. Triads sound nice to us.
Speaker 1:They have a pleasing rhythm to them. I just used one right there. But he's also using language that seems at least to hint at the mystery of Trinity. Different gifts from the same spirit. Different service from the same lord.
Speaker 1:Different working from the same god. A spirit is that word panuma that we talked about. Lord is the word kurios. Very clearly a reference to Jesus is Lord from the previous verse. And God is the word of theos, which implies that for Paul, the language of spirit, the language of Jesus, and the language of God, these are all interconnected, if not in some sense interchangeable.
Speaker 1:The Godhead is actually the model of community from which Paul reasons about the church. And this is helpful, I think. We talked about this on Trinity Sunday a while ago. But the church has a Greek phrase that they used to talk about the Godhead in the third and the fourth centuries. Perichoresis is the term.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it gets translated the eternal dance, but perhaps more literally, it is the dancing around. And it's the idea that God has always been forever since before there was time in a perpetual state of giving and receiving, of speaking and listening, of leading and following all at the same time. That God is community. And the portal that Paul is using that now teaches us everything about what has been gifted to us as individuals. See, I think there's a dichotomy that we've created artificially sometimes when it comes to a conversation of gifts or talents.
Speaker 1:Culture tells us that whatever you have, whatever innate abilities you've been given, whatever resources are at your disposal, those are yours to exploit. I mean, you know, don't abuse people and don't exploit others, but you have a responsibility to live the best life you possibly can, to reach for your dreams, to be all you can be. My apologies to the marines. But then on the other hand, sometimes in religion, it almost feels like anything you've been given is for the church. So you better volunteer.
Speaker 1:You should probably give us a portion of your income. And you need to find your spiritual gifts and put them to work preferably later today, lest you get hit by a bus on the way home and haven't sufficiently proved your worth the big guy. And yet the model that Paul builds off when he speaks of gifts in community is something very different, something less bifurcated, perhaps something more mutual. There's a story that the writer Robert Farah Kapon tells about the creation of the universe. And it's a crass analogy, he says, but sometimes crass analogies are the safest.
Speaker 1:I'll quote him here. He says, not everyone, I'm afraid, is equally clear that God is not just a cosmic force or a principle of being or any other dish of celestial blancmage. It's a French dessert. You can look it up later. Accordingly, I give you the central truth that creation is the result of a Trinitarian bash.
Speaker 1:You see, one afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father's fixations. From all eternity, it seems, he had this thing about being. And he would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things, new ways of being, and all new kinds of beings to be. As they talked, God the Son suddenly said, really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don't I go out and mix us up a batch?
Speaker 1:And God the Holy Spirit said, terrific. I'll help. And so they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Spirit put on a tremendous show of being for the father. It was full of water and light and frogs. Pine cones kept dropping all over the place, and crazy fish swam around in wine glasses.
Speaker 1:There were mushrooms and mastodons, grapes and geese, tornadoes and tigers, and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them, and to love them. God the father looked at the whole wild party, and he said, wonderful. This is just what I had in mind. Tov, tov, tov. This means good.
Speaker 1:And all the God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit could think of was to say the same. Tov. Tov. Tov. And so they shouted altogether, Tov.
Speaker 1:Good. And they laughed for ages and ages saying things like how great it was for beings to be, how clever of the father to think of the idea, how kind of the son to go to all the trouble to put it together, and how considerate of the spirit to spend his time directing and choreographing it all. And forever and ever, they told old jokes. And the father and the son drank their wine in in the unity of the spirit, and they all threw ripe olives and pickled mushrooms at each other for centuries of centuries. Amen.
Speaker 1:Now it's just a story from an old theologian slash chef, and his recipe books are good too. And it's a humorous one at that, but it speaks to a far more robust imagination of how the scriptures imagine our gifts are coming together in the church. That we give and we take, and we lead and we follow, that we breathe out our creativity so that we might inhale deeply of something bigger, broader, more beautiful than we ever could have accomplished on our own. Because when Paul says that there are different gifts of the same spirit and different service from the same Lord, different working from the same God, what he is doing is imagining our interactions in the church through the model of our God. And it's an image perhaps of something more like what Kpon describes, not the narcissistic self promotion or the self effacing obligation we sometimes imagine, and certainly not the dismembered parts of the that Paul is contrasting here.
Speaker 1:We are better together. We find our identity together. And this is why I think it's often unhelpful when discussions of our gifts make distinctions along, quote, unquote, spiritual lines. Because when talents like public speaking or singing or prayer or wisdom get separated off from skills like carpentry and logistics and engineering and accounting, what happens is that some of us learn to think of spirituality as part of our identity, and the rest of us learn to think of spiritual as something we do on a Sunday morning, and that would be a shame. Because to be alive, this is spiritual.
Speaker 1:To create and make, this is spiritual. To think and plan is spiritual. To imagine, to strategize, to communicate, all of this is spiritual because all of this is designed to pour into our life together. Paul says in another letter, this time to the Ephesians, he says that we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us. Now first of all, handiwork here, this is the word poema in Greek.
Speaker 1:It's where we get the English poem from. And second, these poems are what God has created in advance for you. What that means is that God has never looked and wondered what to do with you. He has always seen poetry, and he has always seen potential. He has always understood your unique role in his story even in those moments where you haven't quite been able to grasp it.
Speaker 1:And so if the ways that we have spoken about gifts in the church have ever left you feeling excluded or unsure or maybe just unable to grasp your role in community? Because what you do and what you bring to the table wasn't recognized and elevated the way somebody else's talents were. Then would you begin to sense today an expansion of that conversation? Would you know that whatever good you are fascinated with in the world, that is your gift to us. That whatever skills you have cultivated, either through innate ability or hard work, This is your gift to share with us.
Speaker 1:That whatever weakness or lack that you carry into this room, this also is a gift. Because it's a gift that you bring into community so that we might learn how to support and encourage and ultimately celebrate with you. All of this is gift, and it all comes from the spirit of God. There's so much to be said about gifts in the church, and there's so many different ways to approach this conversation. There are the specific manifestations of worship we see in a church like Corinth.
Speaker 1:There are the practical contributions it takes to run a church like Commons. But the founding grounding principle is that there is no such thing as spiritual gifts. Only in that everything is gift, and every gift is from the spirit. May you sense today the voice of that same spirit reminding you that you are a gift to the church. And that regardless of whether what you brought to the table was recognized or celebrated in the past, if you live and you breathe, then you find your being in God.
Speaker 1:May you bring yourself to the table fearlessly and humbly so that it might be offered to God. Because this is the gift of the spirit that we call church. Let's pray. God, there are so many ways that we can speak of your generosity and your graciousness to us. At times, we speak of these gifts in the church that express themselves in your worship, and that is a good and pleasing conversation.
Speaker 1:Times we speak of the things that we do, the skills, the talents, the knowledge that we've acquired, the work that we do to build your kingdom, and this is good as well. But today, we ask that by your spirit, you would help us to set a broad foundation for your generosity. And we would recognize each of us that everything you have gifted to us, our passion, our skill, our gift, our wisdom, our personality, even our weakness and lack. This is the gift of ourselves that you have offered to us to bring into community so that we might find our identity not as a hand or an arm or a leg or a foot dismembered and apart, but instead, as part of community that images and represents the community that sits at the center of who you are. God, help us to see how deeply valued we are in community.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.