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Anxiety Part 1:Mt: 4:1-4
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
God created the world by pouring God's self into creation. And maybe, you know something of that satisfying emptiness.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Hi, everyone. Welcome welcome welcome here. I am so glad that you've joined us today on this Trinity Sunday, on this baptism Sunday, on this kick off to our new series on anxiety Sunday. My name is Bobby and I'm one of the pastors on the team here at Commons. I thought I'd start off today by filling in some of the pieces of what eventually brought me to Commons.
Speaker 1:Some of the major draws for me to move from Vancouver to Calgary at the beginning of last year were these two little humans. My nieces. My younger brother and my sister live in Edmonton and in the last couple of years, they welcomed these rad little humans into our family. I'm also so happy to report that we now have a little dude in the mix. His name is Leighton and he's just eight weeks old and you can spot him in the bottom corner of that black and white picture.
Speaker 1:So even though I'm now only a few hours away, I still don't see them every day, which means I miss parts of their development. But my sister, she is so good at sending me pictures and snaps and videos of my niece, Emery. And a while back, she sent me a video of Emery in the bathtub, and she and my sister are singing these little kid songs that I didn't even know existed in the world. And of course, because my sister can understand her daughter's newly forming language skills, she translates that Ms wants to sing the Paw Paw Patch song about the turtle. And right there on that little video, I witnessed Emery say, turtle.
Speaker 1:With those two little tees for the very first time and my auntie heart exploded. Well, this past week, Emery has put a new word into her rotation. And to tell me about it, my sister sent me this text message, my new world, with these two emojis, slightly frowning face and prohibited. And then she sent this video. It's short, so we're actually gonna play it twice.
Speaker 1:Now, of course, we all know how important it is to teach our little girls and our little boys that no is not a bad word. Those two little letters, n o, they can save them from a whole sea of trouble. But in this moment, sweet little Emery has her n o's a bit backwards. I mean, where does she think her next meal is going to come from? Who does she think is gonna fill up that empty plate?
Speaker 1:And those little no's, they got me making a connection. Last week, we wrapped up our time in Romans, for this year anyway. And sometimes, we read Paul as if he's just focused on the no. And when that's all we see, we miss the intricacy of God's provision in our lives. This leaves us just clutching at empty plates.
Speaker 1:But Jeremy ended the series saying, Paul has discovered a profound trust that God will do good for him. And Jer continued, and above all else, despite his brash bombast, what Paul desperately wants is to invite every single person he encounters into that space of confident trust in the one who sits behind all things. Confidence. Profound trust that God will do good. God behind all things.
Speaker 1:Our new series is called anxiety. And we're gonna talk about our experience with those lingering fears, with low level dread and gnawing uncertainty. We're asking what the story of Jesus' temptation in the in the desert can do to address the anxiety in our minds, in our relationships, even in our politics, and dare I say, in the great cosmic scope of all things. So we'll begin by reading the gospel of Matthew's account of Jesus in the wilderness and then we'll pray a Trinity Sunday prayer and dive right in. Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
Speaker 1:After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, if you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bread. And Jesus answered, it is written. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Let us pray.
Speaker 1:Living love. God, you are. Beginning and end. Giver of food and drink, faith and hope. We pause to say thank you.
Speaker 1:Jesus, wisdom and word, lover of the hard to love, friend of the marginalized, crucified and risen God, we pause to be inspired by you. Holy Spirit, storm and breath of love, bridge builder, eye opener, untamable energy of life. We pause to be secure in you. Holy Trinity, forever one, source of all generosity. In you, we can meet and know and love our neighbors, stranger and kindred together.
Speaker 1:We pause to enjoy you. Amen. So right at the beginning of this short story in Matthew chapter four, we have an unlikely partnership, the spirit and the devil. If we're gonna start anywhere, it's gotta be right here. So what's up with this devil?
Speaker 1:In writing about death and sin and evil, Bonhoeffer highlights that we're never given an explanation for how evil entered the cosmos. We're just shown how to overcome it. The figure of Satan is a spiritual enemy is found in only a handful of Old Testament texts. A serpent in the Genesis poem, short passages in Chronicles and Job and Zechariah, and evil behind empires like Egypt and Babylon and Rome. But in the first century, the idea of this devil had developed into a standard feature in Jewish thought which the Christian church continued to shape.
Speaker 1:But when you add them add them all up, I think it's fair to say that even when Jesus addressed this devil, it's the human condition he is really interested in drawing our attention to. So whatever mask it wears, the force to destroy, to act violently towards another person or a group of people, to judge and oppress, to take more than you need. This force is whatever you wanna call it. It's death. It's scarcity, it's our adversary.
Speaker 1:In our gospel story for this series, it's the force that tempts Jesus to give up before he even gets going. Now, we aren't actually given a physical description of this accuser in the story. So maybe, just for today, we should suspend the ones that we bring to the text. We likely got those images from old Keanu Reeves movies anyways. The devil that tempts Jesus in the wilderness comes at him in the form of words and thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 1:So again, whatever our association is with the language of the devil or Satan, I think we can all relate to the experience of our own thoughts being taken over by much crueler thoughts, by anxious thoughts, by critical and self doubting thoughts. But also, maybe for you, anxiety is clinical and chemical. In her book on her life with an anxiety disorder, Andrea Peterson defies defines anxiety as a chronic sense of uneasiness about a vague future, a gnawing worry about what may or may not happen. If you need more support than you currently have in your life right now with regards to anxiety, then please please talk to someone. We have professionals that we trust connected to our community at Commons, and we would love to make that connection if you don't have the resources.
Speaker 1:And even though I don't have an anxiety diagnosis myself, I can certainly trace anxiety in my own patterns of being. I mean, sometimes, I truly sweat the small stuff. And wherever it originates, I know that it tempts me to live in fear. Stanley Howarwas talks about this unlikely partnership between fear and the spirit. And he says this, the new age that begun in this man, Jesus, requires that the chaff of our lives be burned away.
Speaker 1:That fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit is the fire of a love so intense that we fear its grasp. Yet it is the love unleashed in Jesus' life, the life into which we are baptized. A people freed to love, which is Jesus himself, can live with the joy that comes from no longer being subject to the fear of death. Howarwas is saying that it's actually super normal and superhuman. Well, not superhuman, but very human to turn away from the intense love of God.
Speaker 1:But as we share in the life of Christ, we realize that the temporal things that we cling to to avoid and distract us from our mortality, those things will not free us. They will trap us and multiply our fear. So if the spirit of love teaches leads Jesus into the wilderness and the devil is ready to test him with these three temptations, then why the heck doesn't Jesus carbo load to confront an antagonist like this? Instead, Jesus does something much less strong, much less powerful. The verse reads, after fasting fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
Speaker 1:Now there's a Greek term that helps us with this picture of Jesus and his hunger and it's kenosis. It's linked to the self emptying that Paul writes about when he says that Jesus made himself nothing. It's also in the theology of creation that God created the world by pouring God's self into creation. And maybe you know something of that satisfying emptiness. When you have poured yourself into something or someone and you have nothing more to give, but it's still good and it's still beautiful.
Speaker 1:See what Jesus shows us is that the power of God is most profound not in flashing miracles or militaristic might but in the divine one being poured out in generous and self giving ways. So to uncover how Jesus Jesus resists this first temptation to turn stones into bread on an empty stomach, we need to go back to the story before this one. We need to go back to Jesus' baptism. But before we get to that story, I wanna tell you about a couple of my all time favorite baptisms in modern television. And if you didn't think that was a thing, you're about to see that it is totally a thing.
Speaker 1:First, no, that is not my handsome, hairy chested husband. That is Don Draper, Mad Men season two episode 12. In this baptism scene, we find Don Draper taking a dip in the Pacific Ocean, except he's not really there just for a casual swim. He's taken off from the West Coast to the West Coast from New York, where his life is, of course, a mess on account of his current philandering. After spending time with the only person who knows his real identity and discussing whether or not people can truly change, we are ushered into this baptism scene with a George Jones song.
Speaker 1:Now, I will not be singing that song for you, but it goes, I say Christian pilgrim, redeemed of sin, hauled out of darkness, a new life to begin. Now, in five more seasons, we will watch Don Draper struggle against himself. Nobody walks into the wilderness to face his own demons quite like Don Draper does. But here, in his baptism, Don is who he really is. He's washed clean, and if he wants it, he can have a new beginning.
Speaker 1:Second baptism scene in modern television. The women in orange is the new black, season three episode 13. In this baptism scene, the women have just discovered a hole in the prison fence. So they spend an afternoon just swimming and playing and laughing. We have never seen them this happy and free.
Speaker 1:And I actually gave up on this season until a good friend of mine said that I'd really like the religious conversion story of a character named Cindy from Christianity to Judaism. Which by the way, he was totally right about. I loved that storyline. So while the women are all undergoing their more casual baptisms, Cindy dunks below the water three times, giggling while submerged as she makes this commitment to faith. It's a baptism scene within a baptism scene.
Speaker 1:Any other nerds as excited about that as I am? Maybe just the ministers in the room? Okay. Moving on. So, of course, all of this sunshine and splashing about, it is not these characters' day to day reality.
Speaker 1:As a matter of fact, in the very next scene, conflict is introduced as busloads of new inmates arrive, and their beds are converted into bunks so that the prison system can fit more bodies to make more money. More wilderness awaits all of them. But in these baptism moments, the women are who they really are as if the oppressive forces of poverty and violence against women and addiction and a whole host of traumas were not taken out on their bodies. Here, they are baptized and they are beautiful and they are free. And if they want it, they can live the rest of their lives listening to how this moment in the water has shaped them.
Speaker 1:There is a baptism pattern to the redemptive human story. But baptism doesn't mark the end of the struggle. It invites us to live as if the healing and wholeness that we so long for has already and finally come. Because in Christ it has. When Jesus came out of the water at his baptism, the heavens opened pulling back a curtain to reveal that this is more than a man.
Speaker 1:This is the beloved son of God and the spirit is all over him. The temptations show us that Jesus maintained his baptismal identity. And because he did, we can hold on to our true identity in anxious and empty plate times too. So when you are caught up in the struggle, when your mind is assaulted with accusations that you are not enough or that you don't have enough, when you are in the wilderness of your own story and you cannot make sense of the stuff that is happening in your life, when the world makes you feel very, very afraid, When you are flat out empty and you have nothing more to give, trust that you are a child of those baptism waters. And when you come up from the water, you breathe in the very breath of God.
Speaker 1:Now, if you have not been baptized, please don't disqualify yourself from this truth. Baptism isn't magic, but it's also so much more than just a symbol. So if you haven't experienced the waters of baptism either as an infant or a child or an adult and here at Commons, we celebrate all of those, then just for today, hear yourself called the baptized ones. Listen, baptized ones. Your baptismal identity is something that you can cling to.
Speaker 1:It provides you with the clearest truth of who you are and whose example you follow when the struggle is real and anxiety is on the rise. And it is amazing what will happen when you tell yourself a true story like this one. So we have two more verses to go and they're kind of the point of today. The tempter came not questioning Jesus' true identity as the son of God but presupposing it and putting it to the test saying, if or we could read since you are the son of God, turn these stones into bread. And Jesus responds with this little piece from Moses' speech to the Israelites in Deuteronomy.
Speaker 1:He says, people do not live on bread alone. Life is sustained by the very word coming out of the mouth of God. Jesus puts a stop to what's meant to distract him from his larger mission. But he doesn't do that by building a case. He doesn't get really defensive and justify himself.
Speaker 1:The method of Jesus' resistance is the word of God. So let's take a look at Jesus' relationship with the Torah and the ancient Israelites. Take this text he draws from, Deuteronomy eight. With only a few words highlighted, Matthew's Jewish audience knew that Moses' speech was to the Israelites after their desert testing. And Moses said, observe the commands of the Lord your God, walking in obedience to him and revering him.
Speaker 1:For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land. A land with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills. A land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey. A land where bread will not be scarce, and you will lack nothing. It's a pretty lofty picture which ancient Israel just couldn't live into.
Speaker 1:But the story of Jesus' infancy recapitulates the story of Israel's exodus and exile. Now, having come through the waters of baptism, just like Israel came through the Red Sea, Jesus enters into a fast for forty days and forty nights. And just as Israel was tested in the wilderness for forty years, Jesus is tempted there too. Matthew uses story after story to make the point that Jesus is the new Israel. But why does it matter that Jesus is this new Israel?
Speaker 1:I hope it doesn't sound too cliche or oversimplified to say that it matters because of love. The scriptures lay out the story of love which begins in the garden. It moves through Yahweh's love for this underdog tribe called Israel, and it's passed along from generation to generation. But try as they might, this tribe could not keep the their priorities to love God and to love the world sorted. So Jesus.
Speaker 1:Jesus fulfilled it all. He restoried the story of Israel, a story about saving the world, now to include all the tribes and the renewal of all things. But the story doesn't stop there. It ends in a city where God will dwell and where the water of life flows down the street to heal the nations. And as a church, we carry on that narrative to this great urban consummation.
Speaker 1:God will finish what God has started. But along the way, we will be tempted to forget our true identity as the beloved children of God. This temptation is not just a stepping stone in the middle of the story. This is Jesus affirming that his story is a much bigger story. When we look at our own temptations, we can affirm this bigger story too.
Speaker 1:Like Jesus. There are all kinds of places where we can resist the kind of thinking that only accounts for our own place in the universe. Because here's the thing. When we get stuck in our own small stories, it's easy to forget and live by the world as if it's full of scarcity. That there's not enough food, that there's not enough of anything, that I need to get mine, that it's me against the world.
Speaker 1:And that's the stuff that really makes us anxious. When our imaginations expand forwards and backwards and deeper still, and we begin to see ourselves as a much larger story where God is at work in the renewal of all things, it's this vantage point that brings perspective. Because all of a sudden, our problems are not just our problems. They're his and hers and ours together. And now, we see that we are not so separate, and being connected like this means that we don't have to be so scared.
Speaker 1:Barbara Brown Taylor says that there is no such thing as your bread or my bread. There is only our bread. As in, give us this day our daily bread. Jesus didn't come to feed only himself in a dry dusty desert. He came to feed the thousands who gathered to hear him.
Speaker 1:So if that's the picture of God's generous love moving from just me to all of us, then how do we meet our anxiety with a sincere trust in God? So I've got one wacky Greek word for that question and it's It's the verb that the verb that tells us what the word of God does. It journeys out. It goes forth. The biblical scholar, Fredrik Bruner, says that this pouring out is exciting.
Speaker 1:It pictures a God in constant conversation with creation. And I love that imagery connected to Ekpur Uomai in the canon. It's revelation imagery of fire and lightning going out from the throne of God. It's a sword that cuts down distorted power often found in violent empires. It's the water of life that flows from God to bring healing.
Speaker 1:The point is that God's word is active. It's in constant conversation with the world. The word of God comes to us. And another way to look at this is that Jesus overhauled the faith. The people of God would no longer need the ark to carry the law or the tabernacle to hold it.
Speaker 1:Jesus brought the word of God with him into the wilderness and the spirit brings the word of God to us. And maybe there are countless ways to interrupt anxiety with trust and trust in God, but I wanna finish by talking about just one. The contemplative way. In his book, Into the Silent Land, father Martin Laird writes this about Christian contemplative practice. The mind's obsessing run the mind's obsessive running in tight circles generates and sustains the anguish that forms the mental cage in which we live much of our lives.
Speaker 1:It makes us believe we are separate from God. It makes us believe that we are alone, shameful, stupid, afraid, unlovable. We believe this lie, and our life becomes a cocktail party of posturing masquerade in order to hide the anxiety and ignorance of who we really are. In other words, our minds are full of freak out and anxious noise. But practicing contemplative prayer, taking some quiet time outs, can make us more aware of the presence of God and more likely to hear the word of God that comes to us.
Speaker 1:Now I have dabbled in contemplative prayer for years. I meet with a spiritual director. I've practiced and led Lectio Divina meditations. I've used the Jesus prayer. But the contemplative prayer morning that we hosted here at Commons with the prayer team a few months ago, it brought me closer to an ancient way called centering prayer.
Speaker 1:It's quite simple and I'm gonna happily oversimplify it for you. First, you set aside a little chunk of time. I'm working on twenty minutes in the morning, but I am so not there yet. And then you choose a prayer word. You don't overthink it.
Speaker 1:Just go with something like love or Jesus or my current favorite, shalom. And you set a timer and you take some deep breaths and you acknowledge that you are there with God and you breathe and you stay quiet. But of course, in no time at all, distractions arrive in the form of lies and lists, concerns and memories, things to remember, things to forget. But each awareness of those distractions, you simply meet the distraction with the prayer word. So for me, it says something sounds something like this.
Speaker 1:Hey, Bobby. Remember when that Shalom. Oh, crap. Don't forget to Shalom. What do you think she meant when she said, shalom.
Speaker 1:Oh, you'll never be able to shalom. And honestly, I can't say that I see a huge difference in my life with this practice, not yet. But mostly, what I get to wake up to is the reality that I am not my worry or my fear or my anxiety. I am not the commentary on all the things I think and feel. I am not the things that I crave or that I purchase or consume.
Speaker 1:If you are drawn to this series on anxiety this month because you are aware of the anxiety in your own life and most certainly in the world that we live in, then hear this. God provides so much more than the bread we need for the journey. Sometimes, God's provision comes in the form of a friendship or a creative endeavor or a new opportunity. It might come through a calling or a correction or the story of another shared in trust. God's provision can take the shape of change and confrontation and it can arrive in quiet prayer.
Speaker 1:The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness shows us that there is so much in life that we do not control and so we are invited to put our trust and our love in the provision of God. In hunger and in longing, in life and in death, God is behind all things. God will meet our needs. So may you offer your emptiness to Jesus, the emptied one. And may you sense the holy spirit's filling and may this bring you lasting peace.
Speaker 1:Let us pray. Like my sweet little niece, it can be so easy to forget where our provision comes from. In our forgetting, we clutch to empty plates. Will you remind us, loving God, of your constant care for our needs? We are invited to live our baptismal identity as you did Jesus with deep trust in God's provision.
Speaker 1:Give us the strength to resist the lies which tempt us and help us to live with you. You are the ground of our being. So we offer our emptiness. We quiet our anxious minds. We remind every distraction that we are loved by you God.
Speaker 1:We are loved by you. Amen. Okay. So I have something exciting to tell you about. The prayer team is actually hosting another contemplative prayer morning this coming Saturday where we will be exploring welcoming prayer.
Speaker 1:And we chose welcoming prayer because it fits really well with our current series. So if you'd like to explore the contemplative way further, you can join us here at the church from 10AM till noon on Saturday the seventeenth. Also if you need or would like someone to pray with you, you can make your way to the front and a prayer volunteer will happily meet you and pray with you. So we'll end as we always do. Love God, love people, tell the story.
Speaker 1:See you next week for anxiety part two. Peace be with you.