Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Welcome. My name is Jeremy. Thanks so much for being here. Whether you are in person today or online, thank you for taking part of your weekend to be with us. It really does mean a lot.
And honestly, after two years of ups and downs and twists and turns and, like last week, video sermons, We are so grateful that such a vibrant community continues to track with us here at Commons, even when, like last week, we have to make changes at the last minute. If you missed last week, then I missed it too. I joined you from my living room after a positive COVID test. It is great to be back though after ten days away from everyone. And so I'm thankful for all of your well wishes and also all the work of our health care professionals and everything that they have done to keep us all healthy over these past two years.
We continue to take all of the guidelines really seriously to keep everyone healthy. That said, last week, we also started a new series, an Eastertide series called the old songs. And this series is all about the hidden hymnody in the New Testament. Some of the oldest songs of the Christian tradition that are actually buried for us throughout our New Testament scriptures. And first, I think that's kind of fun.
Right? It's Eastertide right now. Eastertide is the fifty day celebration of resurrection that begins at Easter, but continues all the way through to Pentecost. And what a better way to celebrate resurrection than to sing, or in my case, talk about singing, which is much more appropriate given my skill set. But also, I think because a series like this helps to root our story, the Christian story, including something as important as Easter in the long tradition of God's people.
See, we have the Psalms in our bibles. Right? And most of us recognize that those were poems that were originally written to be sung. Now, none of us may have actually sung them before. Some of us may have.
But in fact, we don't really know what those ancient melodies would have even sounded like exactly. But we recognize that poetry and song and hymnody are part of the story of God's people. In fact, that influences how we read and experience them. Right? There is some beautiful poetry in the Psalms.
There is also some terrible theology in there. Some of the Psalms are expressing deep hurt and lament and rage. We have psalms that we call the imprecatory psalms that call for violence against our enemies and the destruction of their loved ones. And in the light of Jesus, we can see that these are not pure expressions of the heart of God, but they are very real expressions of human emotion. And we recognize that in the grace of God that allows us to voice our deepest hurts and be heard and loved, we can even be transformed in that transparency.
But it's in understanding the nature of the writing, the place and the purpose of those poems in community that helps us to see the beauty even in such difficult words. Fact, the Hebrew scriptures are fascinating precisely for their genre diversity. We have the songs of the Psalms and the myths of Genesis and the politics of the prophets and the history of the kings and chronicles. All of that comes together to shape a story that points us to Jesus. But then, we get to the New Testament, and a lot of that diversity seems to collapse in on itself a bit.
I mean, we have the gospels, which are a form of ancient biography. We have a bunch of epistles and letters, and then you have one measly apocalypse in Revelation, which is an entirely different genre unto itself. So, where's the songs? Where's the singing and dancing that we see all through the Hebrew scriptures? Did we all just get super stuffy when Jesus came along?
Well, part of this series is about recognizing that it is all still there. It's simply hidden and buried at times, and there are songs, there is dancing. We just have to be attuned to look for it. So last week, we talked about the different types of songs that we find in the New Testament. Songs like the Philippian hymn that we'll talk about in a few weeks that may have been, we think they were, preexisting community compositions that Paul is actually quoting back to the community.
So we talked about the significance of that as an example of the kind of work that Paul thinks a community can accomplish together. We're all part of one body, he says. And what one part brings to the table, another benefits from and vice versa. But for us to truly access that kind of blessing, we need to do more than just acknowledge each other. We need to listen to each other and learn from each other.
And I love that Paul actually models that for us when he quotes these types of songs from the community back to the community. It's a reminder that even a sermon can be a conversation if we're willing to let it be one. Today, though, it's a different type of song that we're gonna look at. It's the kind that we find at the start of the gospel of John. And this song is probably not a preexisting composition that the writer of John is quoting to us.
This is a song that the writer is crafting himself for us. But what we're gonna see today, everything is a remix. And whenever we are composing our own songs, any of us, we are always reflecting back a larger story and community. As I said last week, to be Christian is to be shaped by the Jesus that invites us to be shaped by each other. And John gives us a really neat example of that that we can look at today.
First though, let's pray and then today we're going to talk about the remix, the logos, creation, wisdom, and finally the Christ. But let's pray together. God who continues to sing good songs over us, who delights in rhythm and melody and memory and creativity. Might we remember today not only to think of you, but to feel your presence with us, to swim in your goodness that surrounds us always, to breathe in your grace, and then to exhale all that we have to let go of, to repent of. And in that, may we come to know ourselves as you already know us, Loved and healed and welcomed and ready to sing in celebration.
For those moments when we grieve, we ask for the right songs to find us. To give words to our pain and expression to our lament. Those moments when we need to dance, we ask for the right songs to find us, to give movement to our feet and trust to our hearts. For those moments where we need to settle in to quiet awe, we ask for the right songs to find us, to give voice to everything we can't say for ourselves and volume to this profound gratitude that threatens to overwhelm us at times. In all of these ways, we welcome your songs, our songs, and we pray in the stray strong name of the risen Christ.
Amen. Alright. Today, we are heading back to the gospel of John. And that's where we spent lent and Easter this year. But this time, we're gonna start at the start.
So let's read what is sometimes known as the opening prologue to the gospel according to John. Starts this way. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made.
Without him, nothing that was made has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning the light so that through him all might believe.
He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming to the world. He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
Yet to all that did receive him, to those that believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, or a husband's will, but born of God. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory and the glory of the one and only son who came from the father full of grace and truth. So that's John one verses one right through to 14.
And I don't know how you would sing that. Right? I mean, even as I read it though, you get a sense that this is not just normal writing. It's not just prose. There's repetition of words and phrases like we talked about last week.
There's a rhythm to it that just feels mnemonic. And that's important because the section may not have been sung the way that other hymns were, but it is clearly, certainly written to be lyrical. It's meant to be repeated and remembered to stay with you long after you roll up the scroll and put it away. Ever had a song that gets stuck in your head and you find yourself repeating it over and over and over again throughout the day? That's John's prologue.
That's what he's going for. This is an earworm. That said, this passage might already be familiar to you as I read it. Granted, it's a fairly famous section of the gospels, and it's very possible you may have read this multiple times before. But what's really interesting is that it might be familiar to you even if you have never read this before.
Because this passage, this prologue, the section that I'm going to argue should be read as a type of song. It pulls from a number of places in the Hebrew scriptures. So, yes, it's new. This is John writing something for us, but it's also, like every good song, a remix. And in fact, it's only in beginning to realize what John is doing that I think his creativity really comes alive for us.
Now, we're gonna look at the few of the references that he's making and how he's playing with them. But first, let me give you an example of how artists layer meaning in poetry today. One of my favorite artists right now is Kendrick Lamar. He's awesome. But there's this TikTok that's going around from the dissect podcast, which is also awesome, by the way.
But it talks about the layers of meaning in his lyrics. And this particular viral TikTok is about the Pusha t song, nostalgia, that Lamar appears on. And the song is all about how Kendrick grew up during the crack epidemic of the nineties. In his verse, he writes this, quantum physics could never show you the world that I was in. Because when I was 10, back when now nine ounces would get you ten, and nine times out of 10, they didn't pay attention.
When there's tension in the air, nine comes with extensions. Now, you go through all that, and you start picking things out. You start realizing you've got three nines and six tens here. And those tens are kind of buried in words tension and extension and pay attention. But if you do pay attention, you realize there are three nines and six tens.
And if you add that up, you get 87. And Kendrick mentions a few lines later that he was born in '87 in the song. Now, why use nines and tens to get to 87? Well, that's because nine and 10 equals '19, which gives you the full year of his birth, 1987. Except we're not done.
Because three nines and six tens gives you the reference '36. And later in the song, Lamar is talking about how his dad, his family is struggling financially, and he tells his dad, look, I can make money for the family selling drugs. He says this. I said, daddy, one day, I'm a get you right with six thirty six zips, One six thousand grams, then your name will be rich. And 36 zips is a reference to 36 ounces because 36 ounces is one brick of cocaine.
But his dad pushes back on him in the song and says, son, that's not a good idea. And so Kendrick raps back. Go figure. Every verse is a brick. Your son is dope.
In other words, his talent ended up taking him farther than drugs ever could have. But just to make his point here, the verse is literally a brick because it is exactly 36 musical bars long. It's exactly one half of the song to the second. So there's a lot going on here. There's math and there's musical notation.
There's some very good lyrical flow, but there's also this profound story that illuminates Kendrick as a person and invites us to understand some of his journey and where he's coming from. Now, can you enjoy that song without all of that? Absolutely, you can. I'm sure that most people do and don't look into the math at all. But once you get it, there's another level there.
There's a deeper layer to the meaning and all the choices and the words and how they're constructed. And that's when his real creativity and genius hits home for us. Now, side note here. Last week, I mentioned a song lyric that had to be cut from my upcoming book for copyright reasons. Well, there was another lyric from Kendrick that also had to be cut from the book.
In another song, he writes, all man, child, woman, life completely in reverse. I guess I'm running in place trying to get to church. And that had to get cut for the same reasons. The guy's got bars. Unfortunately, they're just not in my book.
Sad face emoji. That said, there's actually something really comparable happening in the prologue to John. And on its own, it's beautiful. You can absolutely read the first teen 14 verses of John on its own and find it beautiful. It's one of my favorite pieces of poetry in the New Testament.
But once we start to peel apart the layers, it begins to take on new meaning as well. So let's go back and take another look here. Right off the bat, when we read this, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. There are at least three significant pieces that come into play already. First, in the beginning.
That's an obvious reference to Genesis. Right? One of the neat things here is that in Greek of John, when you read this, it doesn't actually say in the beginning. It says, in beginning. And that's not a typo.
That's actually a more accurate quote of the Hebrew scriptures. The Hebrew of Genesis actually says, in beginning to create, God formed the heavens and the earth. So there is no creation ex nihilo or out of nothing in Genesis. That's a theological conviction that we hold that God created the universe. But in Genesis, the story actually starts with a formless creation that God molds and shapes into something beautiful.
Now, the funny thing is, we all know this. It's in every commentary of Genesis. So, it's not a surprise. It's just that in the beginning is such an iconic phrase. No one ever wants to remove it from any English bibles.
And that's fine. I get it. But here, John is evoking this ancient poetry about creation to start his story. And that itself is really interesting. If you look at Mark, for example, which is the earliest gospel, his version of the story starts at the start of Jesus' public ministry and teaching.
That's the start of the story for the earliest Jesus followers. The words of Jesus, that's where it begins. A couple decades later, Luke comes along, and he starts the story. He tells the birth story of Jesus, the Christmas story. That's where things start for Luke, the incarnation God in the world.
After that comes Matthew, and he starts with the genealogies of Jesus. The story backs up even further, not just to Jesus' birth, but to the Jesus that is embedded in the history of the Jewish people. That's where the story starts for him. But then, around the turn of the first century, into the second century, John comes along and he says, nice work gentlemen, but hold my beer because this time we are going all the way back. Not just to Jesus' ministry, not just to his birth, not just to his genealogy, but to the founding of the universe.
That's where the story starts for John. However, John is not done. Because rather than just quote Genesis, he begins to remix it. And he does this by bringing in the language of logos. Now, in English, this is the word word in your bible.
And word is an absolutely appropriate translation. That is exactly what the word means. Word. However, there's a lot of history and a lot of baggage that comes with the word logos. Around 500 BC.
So roughly six hundred years before John writes, a Greek philosopher named Heraclitus starts using logos in a philosophical sense. Before that, it just meant word. But Heraclitus uses logos to talk about an underlying principle of cosmic order. So he thinks it means the true essence of something. One of Heraclitus' more famous thought experiments was to imagine a river.
You know a river. I know a river. But when we talk about a river, we all know what we're talking about, and yet, it's always changing. Right? The very fact that a river keeps flowing means its constituent parts, the particular water that makes up the river at any one time is always different.
So he has this famous line. It's impossible to step into the same river twice. Because the river is always in flux. It's always changing. It's never the same because the water keeps flowing, but we can only talk about a river because the river keeps flowing.
That's what a river is. So maybe the word river is the essence of the thing, not the particular elements of it. K. Plato and Aristotle come along a little later. And they use logos, not so much to talk about the essence of a thing, but about the communication of a thing.
So the logos of a river is our ability to talk about a river. For us to understand what we're communicating. It's not the river that's as important as the fact that you and I are able to express our thoughts and our experience of river effectively. And logos is what happens between us when we talk. A little later, the stoics come along, and they're like, actually, we kinda like Heraclitus.
So they assume there's some kind of natural force that controls and directs the universe, and logos is about tapping into that natural wisdom and science, if you can call it that. And then finally, the Neoplatonists come along around the time in the New Testament. And they start to talk about logos as there's a quote here. The force that invests material objects with their shape and form and life. So maybe an artist is about to create, and there's an artifact they're going to make, a painting that comes through in their creativity, but logos is the pure idea that exists in the artist's mind.
Before they put brush to canvas, the thing behind the thing, the thing that gave birth to the thing in the world. All that to say that when John sits down to write and chooses the word logos for this opening and decides to mix that in with creation. It's not chosen lately. This is a very deliberate decision to evoke a long history of philosophical thought and a lot of different ways of thinking. And this is a Kendrick Lamar move here designed to get everyone's philosophical wheels spinning right from the start.
Except he's not done. Because by pulling together logos, the thing that gave birth to the thing, and pairing that with creation, the thing in the beginning, John is making another connection for us. And that's the parallel between the Greek philosophical tradition of logos and the Hebrew tradition of wisdom. So listen to this from Proverbs eight. It's talking about wisdom.
Says, the Lord brought me forth as the first of God's works before God's deeds of old. I was formed long ages ago at the very beginning when the world came to be. When there were no watery depths, I was given birth. When there were no springs overflowing with water. Before the mountains were unsettled in place, before the hills, I was given birth.
Before God made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth, I was there when God set the heavens in place, when God marked out the horizon on the face of the deep. That's Proverbs eight twenty two to 27. And this section is about wisdom personified in the Hebrew imagination. But all of this language, particularly lines like this, the face of the deep, that is lifted directly from Genesis one. Now remember, we talked about how Genesis doesn't actually start with the beginning, but it starts when God began to form and create.
Here's why that's important in Hebrew thought. Because the Hebrew story has always imagined a time before creation, before there were rivers and mountains and dust and galaxies. A time when the idea of creation was given birth in the mind of God, which then became creation. It's the thing behind the thing. Now, the Hebrews called it wisdom.
The Greeks called it logos. And John says, all of it was the Christ. So here's this neat thing that John does. He remembers the poetry of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
But how did God create in that story? God spoke. And he notices that the Greeks have a word that means word, the act of speaking, just like we see in Genesis. But it also has this rich philosophical history that sounds a lot like the idea of wisdom that he knows from his Hebrew tradition. And he also has these connections to the beauty of creation and the way that God speaks through it all.
And so he mashes it all together in one beautifully creative moment that even Kendrick would have been proud of. And here you've got the worship of the Hebrew people, the philosophical searching of the Greek tradition, the poetry and beauty of creation, and our trust in the person of Jesus mashed together into one creative moment describing who God is. A song that reminds us that God has always been speaking in the voice of wisdom, in the presence of creation, all around us all the time, in all kinds of different traditions and practices and cultures all through time. But now God speaks directly to us through Jesus. He is the thing behind the thing, the word behind the words.
So the same creativity that brought the universe to life is now present to us and with us. And everything that God has always been saying about creativity and relationship and love is now alive in the human story through Christ. And the point here is not simply that we should give deference to Jesus. The point here is that everything gives deference to Jesus. Because John is saying that we have all kinds of beautiful words about God, but now we have the logos speaking to us.
The word capital w behind all of the words that we read even in our scripture. And, yes, it's a good song. One that weaves together poetry across generations and cultures, but it is far more than that. This is actually, I believe, the heart of Christian theology. That you and I, we see the divine all around us all the time.
In creation, in each other, in everything that we encounter, but it's always like looking through a glass darkly. In Jesus, we see everything that God has ever wanted to say to humanity. Everything that we need to know about the divine. And this is why when we read our bible, the goal is always to read through the lens of Jesus. Commons, we say that we are completely fascinated by this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the bible, but we worship Jesus.
And this song right here is exactly where that conviction takes root. Not just as a theological decision, but as a song that invites us to encounter the way to live in the world that will lead us back to God. Jesus is more than an idea. He's an encounter with a path that shows us the truth of who God is. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made, and without him, nothing has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all the world, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Let's pray. God, for all the ways that you speak to us and continue to, The ways that you are present all around us in every conversation that we have with each other, in creation that surrounds us, in the beauty of nature and mountains where we see your majesty.
Even in your scriptures where you form stories and narratives that draw us, point us back to your heart. But God, might we also recognize that now you have spoken directly to us, the thing behind the thing, the heart behind all of the words. The Jesus, the Christ that walks through human history showing us exactly what it means to be human and to discover the path that leads us back to you In all of our best ways, as your spirit guides and shapes and forms and molds each of us, just like all of your creation, would you help us to follow the path of peace in the world? And in that, might we steadily come to know you more and more, not through our intellect solely, but through the path that we choose in the world. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen.