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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:It's Lent. Lent is why I am wearing the purple stole. Purple being the liturgical color symbolizing repentance and royalty in which we remember the upside down nature of Christ's reign. And I like to think about this stole as a big neon highlighter across the pages of time, highlighting these super important bits. So as Christians, it's our practice to consider the birth and the death resurrection of Jesus alongside our annual seasons.
Speaker 2:Lent after all means springtime and it takes us all the way to Easter. And there is so much creativity in these traditions. There's history and story and prayer and music and art and color. All of it meant to highlight seasons for our contemplation. So we take these seasons and we go inward, but we also reflect on our relationships and we drop into our hearts and into our bodies as we practice faith and not just think about it.
Speaker 2:But we love that too, don't we? So we begin our Lenten journey this past Wednesday on Ash Wednesday. And Ash Wednesday has creepy Wednesday Adams vibes. Ash Wednesday is all about death. It's about our frailty and our mortality.
Speaker 2:From Ash Wednesday, we set out on our forty day journey to the cross on Good Friday, the vigil of the tomb on Holy Saturday, and finally to resurrection on Easter morning. You know if you needed a little bit of a recap there. And we remember in these Lent and Holy Week rhythms that the divine goes to great lengths to accompany us. So we prepare to encounter this self giving love at the cross and we stay open to the ways God brings life from any force of death that pulls us low. So whether you were here for Ash Wednesday or not, let's take a moment to trace Ash Wednesday so we are all at the starting line of Lent together.
Speaker 2:So with me, lift your thumb. You got it. Good. Now raise it to your forehead and make a simple sign of the cross. From dust you came, to dust you will return.
Speaker 2:Journey with Christ this Lent. Welcome to the Quadragesima. It's what we call the first Sunday of Lent. Before we dive into our series, let us pray. Loving God, we reflect on some of the moments that brought us here today.
Speaker 2:Maybe the rush of the morning is still with us. Maybe we're holding on to some interactions or we're playing them out in our minds. Maybe we're aware of these subtle doubts or curiosities rolling around in our hearts. And we let all of that be as we sense the life in our limbs and focus on our breath. The inhale to lift and the exhale to ground.
Speaker 2:And we extend love and goodwill and deep peace into the parts of the world where there is so much suffering. For places of war and violence and pain and sickness and hunger, Christ be near. Spirit who enlivens, teach us to number our days this Lenten season that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. Amen. Last year, our Lent series was called Book of Signs, and it's okay if you don't remember any of it.
Speaker 2:There will be no exam. Why I forget basically all of my sermons the moment I step off of this teaching stage. And, I mean, that's not entirely true, but it's not entirely false either. Last week, I got an email from someone in Michigan, Michigan, saying, thank you for your sermon on Psalm 13 in 2019. It really helped me.
Speaker 2:And I was like, I definitely didn't preach that sermon. But of course, I checked my notes, and I did. So the Lent series, book of signs, covered the first half of the gospel of John, but that series was incomplete. The second half of the gospel of John has also been given a name. It's called the book of glory and that's our focus this Lent.
Speaker 2:Stories about Jesus from the second half of John's gospel will carry us to Easter. And this is timely because John gives so much space to the final moments of Jesus's life. It's like John is saying the whole story is important of course but I am going to stretch out this last part of Jesus's life so you really take it in. John chapters 13 to 19 make up almost half of the book and they focus on the last twenty four hours of Jesus' life. This is more narrative space for the final moments of Jesus's life than any of the synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke combined.
Speaker 2:So today we're in John 13 verses 18 to 38 and we'll talk about mood swings, a no good very bad night, love and glory and letting go. And we pick up partway through Jesus's final meal with his friends. They're gathered together the day before Passover. Jesus has just finished washing the feet of the disciples saying things like, if you wanna belong to me, I have to wash you. And now that I, your teacher, have washed you, you must wash each other's feet.
Speaker 2:Rub a dub dub. Now the whole time a somber mood is settling in on the scene. There is someone whose feet Jesus has already washed, already included and brought into belonging who will break away. And the narrator has not been coy about this character. As readers, we know it's Judas, but the disciples, they're having trouble clueing in.
Speaker 2:So John 13 verse 21. After he had said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me. His disciples stared at one another at a loss to know which of them he meant. One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. Simon Peter motioned to this disciple and said, ask him which one he means.
Speaker 2:Leaning back against Jesus, excuse me, he asked him, Lord, who is it? So we're gonna stop at that question for another. In the life of Jesus, we run into this question a lot. What exactly did he know and how did he know it? So let's take a look at a literary response to the question.
Speaker 2:We're told that Jesus is troubled in spirit, meaning he is affected by what he knows. He feels these big feelings. And the disciples are at a loss to know, meaning they're grasping and they can't come up with a good guess. And then we have this display of closeness. One of the disciples is reclining on Jesus.
Speaker 2:And a more literal translation is that the disciple is in the bosom, or you could even say in the womb of Jesus. So from turning away to nourished and held, Jesus has this ability to see them all. A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy talked about the scapegoat model of atonement, and he said that Jesus lays it all bare. Our blame, our violence, our division. And looking at the scene this way, we see our human capacity to lose our way and to find it, to choose our own undoing, or to reveal to each other divine qualities.
Speaker 2:We see our ability to reject the love that will save us or to stay as close as humanly possible to love's true source. Jesus isn't naive to any of that. He knows humanity and he lays it all bare and the mood gets dimmer. With something of a pantomime, Jesus answers the question about who will turn away. Verse 26, Jesus answered, it is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.
Speaker 2:Then dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him. So Jesus told him, what you are about to do, do quickly. And still, the disciples, they have a hard time putting the pieces together. They think Judas has been told to maybe buy what's needed for Passover or to go give money to the poor.
Speaker 2:You can imagine this next verse like it's played out on a stage. So as soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out and it was night curtains. I don't know how much this kind of thing happens to you, but sometimes I'm going about my life reading like 12 books at once, And then another story I'm reading has this way of ramming right into the biblical story and sparks these new connections. When I travel, I read books that connect me to the place I'm traveling. And my book choice for our time away in The UK was Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet.
Speaker 2:It had been on my to read list for a while. Also, Scott's a fan, so how can I go wrong? And Hamnet is about Shakespeare and his family revolving around the loss of his son, Hamnet. It's an exquisite novel, but that's not actually the story I'm getting to. Maybe because I was in this imagined world of Shakespeare.
Speaker 2:But as Jonathan and I were nearing the end of a very long travel day that took us from Edinburgh to Glasgow by train, an Uber ride to our car rental, a long drive on the opposite side of the road, driving manual, I might add, to a ferry, and a ferry ride that was actually three hours later than we had thought, maybe it's because of all of that that we decided to use our extra time together to read Macbeth, you know, as you do in Scotland. So you can imagine the two of us big nerds also just leaning against each other on a ferry in the Inner Hebrides reading Macbeth quite poorly, I might add, as the boat sliced through the dark night and sea. Now if you're like, don't you dare turn this into an English class, Bobby, I won't. I promise you, this is theology. But if I know anything about theology, it's that it comes to us through story.
Speaker 2:Where Macbeth begins as a hero and then devolves into an antihero, Judas, in John's gospel, is only ever portrayed as the lost one. He is repeatedly called the betrayer in chapter twelve, thirteen, eighteen, and nineteen. Now we aren't given reasons for why Judas does what he does. Did his mother not love him? Was he horribly bullied?
Speaker 2:Did he just have trouble trusting what was good? We have no idea. We only have a psalm quoted to say that it was meant to be this way. And to me, this is unfortunate because what I loved about reading Macbeth is the way we trace how Macbeth becomes a betrayer and a murderer and a madman. But in the tragedy of Judas, we detect that Judas has also opened himself up to a destructive force at work in the world.
Speaker 2:But like Macbeth, there is no way no way that Judas started there. Because think about it, there was a moment when Judas was called. And there were years where he listened to Jesus and served and loved. And now near the end, something has changed for him and only Jesus sees that. Even the other disciples don't see betrayal in him.
Speaker 2:They look around that dinner table, all of their feet so fresh and so clean and they wonder who, who amongst us would betray you? Their eyes skip right over Judas. The scholar Caroline Lewis says that we are meant to see ourselves in the beloved disciple leaning up against Jesus' chest. The beloved disciple is anyone who reads and hears this gospel, it is every disciple, it is you. And I would argue that the same is true for Judas.
Speaker 2:Just as Macbeth reminds us that one man can be both hero and antihero, our startup story for Lent reminds us that we can be beloved and betrayer both. It's me. Hi. I'm the problem. It's me.
Speaker 2:As one of our great poets sings, Lent is a time to face all of who we are, to scan and see if our humanity is intact and if our love is alive or if we are shrinking and we are suspicious and we are losing our way. Traditionally, in Lent, we pray and we fast and we give. And this trifecta of disciplines speaks the truth of our sin and how good it can feel to find a better way. Now tucked into this scene is some of the teaching Jesus will do more of in the coming weeks. So listen to the themes of glory and love here.
Speaker 2:Now Judas was gone. When Judas was gone Jesus said, now the son of man is glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him God will glorify the son in himself and will glorify him at once. My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now where I am going, you cannot come.
Speaker 2:A new command I give you, love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my my disciples if you love one another. Like I said, there are two big themes in this teaching, love and glory. But first, glory. It's not a stretch to say that glory is dizzying.
Speaker 2:Also, the word is a little old timey, isn't it? Like, what comes to your mind when you hear that word, glory? Besides maybe a word you would sing at church, is it part of how you imagine God? Maybe, but maybe not. Well glory comes from the Hebrew word kavod and kavod literally means mass or weight.
Speaker 2:And theologically, it's understood to mean respect and honor. And the writers in the New Testament translate that word to doxa in Greek. In the New Testament hymns, doxa communicates God's brilliance and presence. And in the history of interpretation, glory has this long and winding road. From the time of the church fathers to Vatican one, the question was asked over and over and over again, what does it mean that creation glorifies God?
Speaker 2:Does it simply mean that to exist is to give God glory? Do you have to have consciousness to bring God glory? And later, the conversation would revolve around just how narcissistic is this God? Does God need hype women and men? Or does God create out of goodness?
Speaker 2:And glory is the overflow. All of these inquiries are meant to lead us to this confession. The entire life of Christ is an event of divine glory or as one writer puts it, the New Testament identifies the glory of God with the glory of Christ. But still, you have to wonder, what does glory mean to you? One on ramp that I love comes from Hans Urs von Balthazar who says that we get at God's glory through goodness, truth, and beauty.
Speaker 2:I love that. So let's steer this glory train back to Judas and betrayal. Remembering that there is a second big theme to this teaching in John 13 and that is love. Do you believe that Jesus really loved Judas? Of course you do.
Speaker 2:Jesus loved Judas even as he saw something in Judas turn away. So what of God's glory do we trace in this very complex friendship? Well remember the affirmation Christ's entire life is an event of divine glory. And so we see here what love and glory look like. It's giving people an out if they need one.
Speaker 2:It's respecting their path which might look nothing like your path. And it's being honest about who can journey with you and who cannot, and you can be sad about that. But glory is also about all the people around you who are sticking close. It's about integrating your suffering into your wisdom. It's about love that goes out into the world and never ever dies.
Speaker 2:There is room in divine glory for every part of who you are. You likely know this, but Judas does not come back. He is a tragic figure. Later, after he turns Jesus over to the authorities to kill who will kill him, Judas attempts to correct his wrong. And when that fails, he takes his own life.
Speaker 2:Judas, our patron saint of those we've loved, who, by their own hand, couldn't bear to live another day. Judas is my uncle. He is my cousin. He is my friend. I've always refused to leave Judas on the page.
Speaker 2:He's more than a flat character to me. I don't know what happens to us after we die, but I am certain that we can never cast ourselves so far off from God that God cannot reach us. So blessed be Judas, the one Jesus respected enough, loved enough to let go. We end with one more beat of the story today. This short exchange with Jesus and Simon Peter at the close of chapter 13.
Speaker 2:Peter asks, my Lord, where are you going? Wherever it is, I wanna go there too. And Jesus says, where I am going, you cannot follow, not yet. Peter says, why? I'll lay down my life for you.
Speaker 2:And Jesus calls him out, knowing him so well. No, Peter, you aren't always as sturdy as you think. You will deny me three times before the break of dawn. I wonder if Jesus' path is so intertwined with Judas and Peter's that he could only arrive at the cross, only let go of his life after practicing letting go. Lent is a season of forty days where we practice this trust.
Speaker 2:And maybe you're well on your way with your Lenten practices. Awesome. High five to you. But if you aren't, let me offer you a few simple ideas to inspire you. Get into the habit of good old fashioned spring cleaning.
Speaker 2:Go through your closets in the weeks to come. Clean out that junk drawer. Dust off the top of your cupboards if you dare. Let some stuff go. What we do with our bodies has a way of inspiring our souls.
Speaker 2:There is prayer in our puttering. And go ahead and practice fasting. It is not too late to give something up. Pick your poison, booze, social media, spending junk food, negative self talk, going with less will create more space and more quiet and goodness. Finally, give.
Speaker 2:Give money to a cause you believe in. Give your undivided attention. Give a handwritten card to someone who's been on your mind. Give yourself a moment to just stare out a window. Give a second chance.
Speaker 2:And hey, it's okay if you don't get your Lenten practice perfect. Get up and start again. As you pray, as you fast, as you give, as you practice letting go, feel yourself get lighter. And into those empty spaces will flow the never ending glory of God. Let us pray.
Speaker 2:Loving God, you offer us your glory, your beauty, your goodness and truth. Every moment of every day through the spirit always teaching us, always wooing us, always drawing us toward one another. Do we take just a moment before we head into this gorgeous Sunday to hold onto one thought or an action we'd like to focus on in this first week of Lent. Maybe it's the letting go of our expectations of others. Maybe it's in the acknowledgment of a season that feels like a very bad night.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's in the hope of glory always outrunning us and reminding us of our dignity and our complexity. So spirit of the living God, present with us now, Enter the places of our letting go and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.