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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. 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 2:A couple of weeks ago, I got to catch up with an old friend on the telephone. Now, I don't like talking on the telephone. I'm sure I'm not alone in the room. I rarely answer, and I certainly don't check my messages. If you leave one, I just let my cell phone plan make that message magically disappear.
Speaker 2:Now, before I came to Calgary several years ago, I had a whole life with completely different people in it, and it was so good, and I'm here now, and that's also so good. But it's really good, like good for my soul when I get to reach back and reconnect with people I've loved and still love who are interested in knowing this version of me, this Bobby with bigger ideas about God and wonderful partnered love in my life, which is what actually brought me here to Calgary, and my effort in other roles like being an auntie. Both my life and my dear friend Dave's life are really quite different now. But I'm so proud of the two of us. We're still on this journey of becoming who we are.
Speaker 2:So the day after our phone conversation, I texted Dave a thank you, and he texted back, and this is that short exchange. I wrote, thanks so much for the open and honest chat last night. It was so good to hear the voice of my old friend who is still him, but somehow even better and more self realized. And Dave replied, you too, Bobby. One of the greatest opportunities in life is the chance to see what's still ahead over each hill we attempt, good or bad.
Speaker 2:We can keep growing. It's beautiful. And I share this with you today because what Dave said has something to do with the series that we have been in for six weeks. This At Common series is where we've taken the statements from the first page of your journal and expanded on them. And each of those statements were written with you in mind and your growth.
Speaker 2:That you would be fascinated with the scriptures in new ways but worship Jesus. That you would see in Jesus the heart of the divine. That you would let go. Let go I tell you of an angry, violent, abusive God, that you would affirm surprising acceptance and scandalous grace in your own road of healing, and that you would participate in the ongoing work of the spirit with every fiber of your beautiful being. So many of you have left behind aspects of Christianity that weren't working for you anymore and that is brave to leave old ways behind.
Speaker 2:And it's also freeing when you realize that you want more and there could be more exhilarating hills to climb when it comes to faith. Like, maybe your faith is inexhaustible. New vistas, new hiking buddies, new encounters with awe. We can keep growing. As my friend Dave said, through the good and the bad, it is beautiful.
Speaker 2:So today, we wrap with the final statement in the At Common series. It's about renewal and spirit who empowers us. But before we dive in, let us pray. Loving God, we take a moment to check-in with ourselves. How do we arrive here today?
Speaker 2:Are we tense? Are we stressed? Are we worried? Are we calm? Are we joyful?
Speaker 2:Are we just okay? Thank you for the ways you welcome us as we really are. And as we relax our shoulders and deepen our breath, we are mindful of the peace that surrounds us and we are again so mindful of the places where peace is disrupted. We pray for Israel and Gaza. Again, God show mercy.
Speaker 2:We pray for Ukraine. God show mercy. We pray for our planet in all the ways it requires our love and reverence. God show mercy. Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.
Speaker 2:Amen. So I want to begin by reading in full the At Commons statements. There's value for us in rehearsing these statements. When we do so, we internalize intention. You see, I grew up in the Prairies.
Speaker 2:People don't always peg me as a prairie kid, but I was super rural. That's a thing. Right? Very rural. I grew up on a Red Angus cattle ranch in Southeast Saskatchewan.
Speaker 2:And whenever I doubt my own ties to rural life, I simply remember that the four h pledge is seared in my mind forever. There has never been a time when I couldn't rattle off the pledge. I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, my health for better living for my club, my community, and my country. The four h pledge. It never leaves me.
Speaker 2:My point is that the at commons statement, a pledge if you will, from the front of your journal can ground you. I'm not saying you need to memorize it, I mean, that's kind of commons hardcore, But I would encourage you to read it regularly, even at least every year when you get the new journal. Internalize intention. Okay. Here it is.
Speaker 2:At Commons, we are completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the Bible, but we worship Jesus. The scriptures lead us to the realization that Jesus is the only exact representation of the divine and that God has always looked like Jesus even when we didn't see that clearly. Because of that, we have abandoned the idea of an angry, violent God in order to fully embrace the good news brought forward by Jesus. We believe that Jesus came not to change God's mind about us but to repair our imagination of God. Realizing this and coming to understand that God is love, we affirm surprising acceptance and scandalous grace as the way God chooses to heal all things.
Speaker 2:We desire to participate in that renewal by following the way of Jesus empowered by the spirit, trusting that this good news is even better than we can imagine. Welcome. Okay. Today, we're in John 14, and we're going to talk about what's with obedience, the bad parts, theology of accompaniment and peace. We begin with John 14 verse 15, if you love me, keep my commands.
Speaker 2:That's it. That is the verse. My question for you as we wade into the text today is this, does obedience sit at the center of your relationship with God? Like when you get up in the morning, is your first thought, how shall I obey the Lord today? If it is, great.
Speaker 2:But I think for many of us, it is not. Of course, obedience is a major biblical theme. Maybe you're thinking about the story of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the commandments in the Exodus story, the pleading of prophets to get Israelites to obey Yahweh. And every book of the New Testament holds onto the theme. So obedience is everywhere, but does it motivate you?
Speaker 2:When Jesus tells his disciples near the end of his life to keep his commandments in John fourteen fifteen, he says, commandments plural, which is kinda weird because he had just finished speaking about commandment singular. John thirteen thirty four, I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. And throughout his teaching, Jesus has an ongoing dialogue with folks who want to know what it really means to obey the law. And Jesus reminds them what the law is about.
Speaker 2:Every rule, every commandment, every divine urging is about love. It's the love you have for God. It's the love God has for you. It's the love you put in action for one another. And in their time and in their place, every commandment was a task of love.
Speaker 2:And Jesus underscores that. All the commandments fit into this new commandment, love. Now, here's the thing about me. I don't like being told what to do. My friend asked my mom years ago to spill the tea about me, and she just said, oh, Bobby, little miss independent.
Speaker 2:So no, I don't sink very easily into obedience. And maybe you don't either. Maybe the word has been abusive to you to get you to behave in a way that makes you feel small or causes you to ignore the wisdom within. What I do like, however, more than like anything really, is trust and relationships that heal us and enough room to pay attention to our very best desires. So if being told what to do or considering abusive or considering obedience is hard for you, follow Jesus as he brings obedience back to love.
Speaker 2:Another way to say this is if you aren't sure if you love God, I wouldn't worry too much about obeying God. The priest and scholar Raymond Brown calls obedience a whole way of life in loving union. It's divine intimacy over strict insistence. It's holy warmth over cold distance. It's a whisper in the ear, not a deity screaming in your face so that you comply.
Speaker 2:Obedience isn't blind. It isn't you emptying your brain and just going along. It can be good news for your flourishing. But let's back it up a bit. We're going to get to the role of the spirit in the work of renewal.
Speaker 2:However, first let's check the context of what we read today. John 13 to 17 is the farewell discourse and prayer. And as John portrays the last supper, there is this disturbance almost crackling in the air. And Jesus is coaching the disciples toward the worst part of his story and what will come next. Jesus consoles them even though he's the one about to die.
Speaker 2:John 13. It was just before the Passover festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Then what happened is betrayal is set in motion through Judas.
Speaker 2:And Jesus gets up from the meal and strips off his robe and he washes the feet of his friends and then he comes to Peter and Peter says, oh heck no, you will never wash me. And Jesus says, unless I wash you, you have no part with me. Then Peter says, okay, do it. Wash me head to foot, limb to limb. We've already talked about obedience as love, but what is so special here is that before we can obey or like Peter honestly, make a mess out of obedience, before we consider living out the Jesus commandment, we're invited first to let Jesus love us.
Speaker 2:That's it. Fully, entirely, perfectly. Jesus shows us love as service. Love is service, not demand. And maybe you don't feel like your feet are being washed but every provision and every delight is a gift that gives you strength.
Speaker 2:The farewell discourse prepares disciples for the bad parts ahead and it is so bad. Jesus does not dodge his death. With this depth of vocation, he prepares himself and he prepares his friends for total heartbreak. Don't fall for the lies that say that the love of God means you will not suffer or that that creates distance with you and God. Don't believe that enough prayer will make things just hurt less.
Speaker 2:Jesus was the love of God incarnate, and the climax of his life only came after great suffering. Renewal is always on the other side of death. We know this in the seasons. As we walk through the forest and smell decaying organic material every year, the leaves let go. The seasons pass away and we endure dark days before they get bright again.
Speaker 2:I don't have to tell you that every life has its share of bad parts. I'm just so sorry that it does. A war that drags off or displaces loved ones, abuse that's really hard to outrun, so much disappointment and loneliness and pain. But the hope of the gospel, the brightness in the form of our faith promises the divine spirit who intimately accompanies us in renewal. So let's get to some good news.
Speaker 2:Shall we? Through the farewell discourse, Jesus holds up a torch to illuminate the darkness. See, ridiculous illustration of my husband holding up a torch in the night in our backyard. I don't really know what he's doing there. That's just how we spent Thanksgiving, staring at fire in the dark.
Speaker 2:I have zero regrets but that was just a bonus for you today. Back to Jesus. Across three chapters, Jesus tells his disciples, I am giving you a gift that will keep you and me together long after I'm gone. In other words, there is light in the dark. Jesus says, and I will ask the father and he will give you another advocate to help you and to be with you forever, the spirit of truth.
Speaker 2:The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. Two things. Who is the advocate? And what's it here for?
Speaker 2:The Greek word for advocate is paraclete. Maybe you've heard it before. It's a compound word made up of the preposition para, meaning with, and the verb kaleo, meaning to call, as in called alongside. Now, the most literal translation is legal advocate. It also gets translated as comforter or helper, and one scholar translates Paraclete as encourager or true friend, and I am totally here for that.
Speaker 2:This encourager, this spirit of truth is the connection between the historical life of Jesus and the future life of the church. And as I read this, there's this sense that Jesus is putting together what it all means in the moment. It's like he says, when people look away from truth, they look away from spirit but you're different. Spirit will be with you. Oh, wait.
Speaker 2:Spirit will be in you. Like, when you're really in the divine flow, people won't be able to tell where I end and you begin. And it's this, this pattern of relationality that I am so captivated by in the text. It's not evidence of the trinity exactly. That doctrine doesn't settle into the church for a few hundred years but it is this triadic relational pattern where one person slash same substance of the divine blends into another.
Speaker 2:Jesus is linked up with the Father, the Spirit will be with the disciples forever, Jesus is going but He's also coming back so don't freak out. You won't be alone. And this kind of awareness of God through tricky times can be called a theology of accompaniment. And we see this in the text. We see spirit accompany Mary when she's told about the baby inside of her.
Speaker 2:And we see spirit accompany Jesus in ministry through the desert of his temptation to the river of his baptism. We see spirit accompany apostles and disciples as they kept innovating, innovating the Jesus way decades after encountering the resurrected Messiah. But here's the truth of us. We love the question why? Why do bad things happen?
Speaker 2:Why doesn't God intervene? Why have you forsaken me? And that last question is holy uttered by Jesus himself. And a theology of accompaniment says, you know, we don't really know the answer to why. It will often be met with silence.
Speaker 2:But we can insist on a God, insist on a God who suffers with. And in the words of the author Shusaku Endo, a God who allows for our weakness. The theologian Elizabeth Johnson speaks of accompaniment like this, and I read her words like a prayer. The living God, gracious and merciful, always was, is, and will be accompanying the world with saving grace, including humans in their sinfulness and humans and all creatures in their unique beauty, evolutionary struggle, and inevitable dying. But before you think, oh, that's a bit heavy, I want you to hear it as good news.
Speaker 2:To be empowered by the spirit is to know that transformation is eternal. So you know, try to get on board. To be empowered by the spirit is to trust that evil does not have the last word. It can't. And to be empowered by the spirit is to hope that after every death is a new beginning.
Speaker 2:I don't really know how. But love is never lost and you don't need enemies anymore and somehow everything belongs. With this spirit power, what are we to do? And I think a real option is to work for peace. The second of five paraclete passages transitions us to peace and that's where we'll end today.
Speaker 2:A little later in John 14 Jesus says, but the advocate, the holy spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
Speaker 2:The work of the spirit is in sync with the work of Jesus. In John's prologue, peace is like the light of God's face shining in the world. And that's a stark contrast between Rome's imposed peace by military force. But gospel peace is more than the absence of conflict. Gospel peace is actively given and pursued.
Speaker 2:In fact, Jesus offers a variation of Jewish leave taking. He says, I don't just wish you peace, I give you peace. Now live from that settled place. So let's return to your morning intention when you wake up. If it's not, how shall I obey the Lord today?
Speaker 2:What could it be? Our sisters and brothers in the Orthodox tradition take seriously the work of renewal. They see in the resurrection not an escape from the world, but the ongoing transformation of the world. It is our vocation, our calling, our mission to anticipate renewal in all things and to work for renewal in all things. Saint Basil the Great, an early church father from the fourth century, wrote a treatise on the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 2:And he wrote about how the spirit comes to us when we withdraw ourselves from evil. In our context, I imagine withdrawing from evil means turning from division, halting hopeless narratives, and disrupting death dealing forces like greed and indifference. And Saint Basil called this withdrawal from evil, the act of returning to our natural beauty. He said that when we withdraw from evil, the spirit illuminates our souls like a sunbeam falling on a transparent substance. The soul illuminates light from itself and that grace is sent forth to others.
Speaker 2:To paraphrase Saint Basil, he said, look out because a spirit bearing soul, you'll hardly be able to comprehend what could come next. So when you wake up in the morning, trust this. You participate in renewal. You participate in renewal. You participate in renewal.
Speaker 2:So maybe your question on waking could be, how will I participate today? And I think in so many ways, you already do this when you comfort a crying child, when you leave a gracious ellipsis in every story of estrangement, when you practice the words, I forgive you and I'm so sorry and gosh, I love you. When you give what you can to meet a need, when you don't turn away from the pain as it erupts in the world, when you take a moment to breathe and reflect before you respond, you are renewal. You are a sunbeam of spirit. You are something of the very nature of the divine right here on earth.
Speaker 2:Let us pray. Loving God, thank you for all of the ways that we get to keep changing and how our imaginations get to be made new. We can call all of that work obedience, we can call it intimacy, we can call it love. So for all the suffering we witness and feel for the bad parts of every story, collective and personal, we ask for a deep sense of accompaniment and trust that you, living God, are near and we are not orphans, we are not alone. You have given us peace and we will try.
Speaker 2:Jesus, help us to try to live your peace. So spirit of the living God, present with us now, enter the places of our suffering, our attempts to get our needs met, our longing, and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.
Speaker 3:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 3:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.