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Habit - 1 Cor 12
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Because here's the secret that no one wants to tell you in church on a Sunday, you won't be able to trust a story this good for an entire lifetime. That's not how faith works. Because there are ups and there are downs, and you weren't meant to be strong enough on your own. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
Speaker 1:We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. You are still getting a tea or a coffee, espresso in the lobby, or our new cold brew that I tested out this week. Check that out before you go. That's alright.
Speaker 1:Get your drink and make your way back to a seat. Welcome today. My name is Jeremy, and we are really glad that you are here with us today. Already a busy day with child dedications and baptisms, but it is an incredible privilege to celebrate with these families, and we are so blessed to get to do so. However, we also wanna make you sure that you know once again that there are no church services next week.
Speaker 1:All five of our normal services are suspended as we go out to serve our neighborhoods. This year, we are hosting Stampede Breakfast in Kensington and Inglewood. Last year, 1,700 of our best friends joined us. This year, with two block parties, we're expecting even more than that. We got face painting and live bands and bouncy castles and petting zoos and of course lots of free breakfast, including gluten free options for all those who need them.
Speaker 1:So if you haven't volunteered yet, head to commons.life to register. We'd love to have you. And if you can't volunteer, then we would love even more to have you as our guests, you and your family. So 9AM to noon here in Kensington, 10:30AM to noon in Inglewood. Now before we get started today, this was also a critical moment in the history of our denomination this week, and it is with heavy hearts that we let you know that the ECC Ministerium has voted to remove credentials from the pastors of First Minneapolis Covenant Church.
Speaker 1:The annual general meeting of the ECC voted to involuntarily remove First Minneapolis Church from the ECC. At present, this decision does not directly affect commons, and we maintain that there is a place for commons within the Covenant Church in Canada, but we also want our community to know that this does not change our commitment to a third way through contentious issues. At Commons, there is not and there will never be any litmus test beyond that declared trust in Jesus as Lord and the commitment to treat each other generously and equally. That local commitment to each other and to the LGBTQ community remains absolutely unchanged by this week's decision. Our team has prepared to voluntarily surrender our ministry credentials to the ECC, but despite our differences on how LGBTQ persons are included in community, we actually believe that our voice within the Covenant Church is now more vital than ever.
Speaker 1:And so we are committed to staying, we're committed to contributing, we're committed to helping the ECC find a new way forward for as long as they will let us. Generosity, kindness, and resolve in equal measure is what will hold this community together in this season as we follow the spirits leading. If anyone is hurting because of this development, please reach out to us. Our staff is creating space this week to respond and be present to those who've been injured by the decision. We know it's hard, and so grace and peace to you.
Speaker 1:Now, I know that is heavy for some of us, but at the same time, I think we respond well by continuing forward in grace and peace in the vision that God has for us as a community. And so today, despite what is swirling, we want to talk about our singing together. Because ironically, song is one of those habits that has this ability to carry our grief and pain along with our joy and celebration within its rhythm. And so today, we sing, or at the very least, we talk about it. However, before we go there, let's gather up where we've been.
Speaker 1:We started by talking about the significance of habits themselves and that our unspoken patterns and our unconscious rhythms often speak to where we really place our trust in the world. That's ultimately what faith is about. It's not the theology that we give mental assent to. It's not the work that we do to learn all the right answers. It's who we trust.
Speaker 1:Because Christianity is, at the end of the day, at the end of time, about trusting that Christ will do good for us. And our habits tell us a lot about what we really trust. At the same time though, our habits can also move us toward the trust that we want to build. And that's why we talked about confession last week. There are two ideas that are really important to me when it comes to confession.
Speaker 1:The first is the recognition that confession isn't forgiveness. God forgives and God forgives generously and that's the gospel. So confession is never how we earn that or we buy that. Confession is where we turn to one another to have that grace spoken back to us. And the fact that sometimes you need someone to speak on behalf of the divine, to tell you that you are loved and you are welcomed and you are forgiven.
Speaker 1:The fact that sometimes you need to hear forgiveness with your ears. That is not a lack of faith. It's not a sign that you don't trust God. It simply means that you're human. And the fact that we get to act as representatives of divine forgiveness for each other.
Speaker 1:The fact that our breath in our lungs carries grace into the world, this is an incredible realization. But second, and almost even more incredible, is what confession does for community. Because communities are often formed based on who is the other. Who's with us and who's against us, who's inside our boundaries and who's outside our walls. But when confession becomes a regular habit in community and when we are comfortable to speak our full truth to each other, to name ourselves as an outsider, and then in that very moment be welcomed back in and embraced.
Speaker 1:This completely changes the basis of community within the Christian story. For some, there are insiders and there's outsiders and the good news is you're on the inside. But my contention is that when we practice naming our story and holding nothing back, when we confess our brokenness to each other and we know ourselves as welcomed regardless, what we come to realize is that the good news is that outsider was never a category that existed in the mind of God to begin with. Now, today, we have one more habit as we close this short series. We wanna talk about why we sing.
Speaker 1:But first, let's pray. God, we open our hearts today. We recognize that words carry meaning, and meaning brings us closer to you, and yet we know that our thoughts and our words and our ability to articulate and communicate will always fall short of you. And so we turn instead to sound and rhythm. We embrace the ineptitude of language, and we turn to the arts to capture something of where our cognition fails us.
Speaker 1:We bring to you today all of the hurts and anxieties, our fears, and our doubts, all of the things that we carry with us but we struggle to name. We pour them out in front of you today. We make ourselves vulnerable and naked and we trust that you will never shame us. For those of us in need of resurrection, pray that as we surrender ourselves to the rhythm of grace, we would learn what it means to be brought back to life. For those of us who feel distant and cold today, we echo the poetry of your church.
Speaker 1:We ask that you would kindle within us the desire to love you. For those of us who walked in here full of grace and ready to sing as if we could barely contain our joy and melody seemed to help, we offer our thanks. And we ask that this moment right now would be so real that it would remain with us even when life becomes a struggle once again. In all of these songs, God, we trust that you are with us, and we trust you to carry us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Okay. Today is about singing. And for those of you who are worried, I promise I will not try to sing for you. There are those things that I'm good at and there are those which I'm not, and most of my career has been figuring out which is which.
Speaker 1:The irony though is that I do play guitar and I'm not bad. Like I'm not saying I'm good enough to be up here on the stage on a Sunday, I'm not, but I can play. And you know what's worse than just being a terrible singer? It's being a terrible singer with a good enough ear that you know you are a terrible singer. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
Speaker 1:So my advice is just don't tell the person beside you. Let them have this one. It's fine. That's a joke. They're fine.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing. When we come and we gather and we sing every Sunday, we rarely pause to think about why. And that's actually okay. Sometimes habits are at their most powerful when they do their work on us unattended. So I don't want to try to over intellectualize what singing is about, or why music is healing or why even those of us who can't carry a tune are drawn to the experience of song.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the mysterious is beautiful, but I do think that some reflection may function to deepen our shared experience of some days. Now my son is just picking up the idea of singing. He has just completed kindergarten, and they sing the national anthem every day. And so I am now regularly subjected to his rendition of O Canada at home. It's painful.
Speaker 1:But he's also started pulling together some of his own songs. A lot of them are about God, which is really nice. Although, I'm not sure we're gonna start incorporating them into our gatherings together just yet. This week, I opened my phone and I found a selfie song from my son. Take a look at this.
Speaker 2:God's the best. God's the best. Oh, ten, nine, eight, seven. Oh, God is the best. God is the best.
Speaker 2:But earth is the best too. Together, you make the best ultimate robot of love.
Speaker 1:K. I'm not sure if you caught that last bit about God and Mother Earth teaming up to create the ultimate robot of love. I believe that's in Revelation somewhere, but I'll have to go take a look. I don't know for sure. But it is a lot of fun to see our son playing with story and rhythm and song as he explores big ideas about things like faith, but we all have this connection to song somewhere inside.
Speaker 1:And yet, we all show up in a room like this and we sing, and let's be honest, that's a pretty strange habit. I mean, where else do people gather regularly to sing together outside of karaoke bars. And so I wanna talk about a few things today. The practice of empathy, the healing of community, and the joy of getting to speak on behalf of each other. Let's start with empathy.
Speaker 1:Because I think singing together is actually one of the most fundamentally empathetic things we do in our week. We come in here, we stand beside each other, we project words up on a screen in front of us, and we sing them together. And I'm gonna guess that for most of us, this is probably the only place that you subject yourself to someone else's musical choices this way. See, so much of our lives right now is so hyper individualized. Probably like me, you have an Apple Music or a Spotify subscription, and I have all the access to all the music from all the times in all the world, and I spend 50% of that time listening to Pearl Jam like all people of good taste do, but I can go as long as I want, weeks on end, without ever listening to a song that I didn't choose for myself or trust an algorithm to choose for me based on the other songs that I've chosen.
Speaker 1:Now I know some people still listen to the radio and good for you, but for a lot of us music is on demand. And yet here at church, we gather to sing songs we didn't choose with people we don't know. Some of them we don't even like, the songs that is. You see, for two thousand years now, we have been creating and curating expressions of Christianity that are radically diverse. And this is actually a really important part of the Christian story.
Speaker 1:And like our Muslim friends, Christianity has always affirmed that the gospel has nothing to do with the specific words on the pages of our sacred texts. The bible is not our God. Jesus is the word of God. And this is why we can read our bibles in English today instead of Greek or Hebrew because we have always embraced translation both in terms of language and in culture, as the story that matters, not the style. What that means is that our worship and our singing have taken on as many different shapes as there have been communities of faith throughout our history.
Speaker 1:I wanna play you an audio clip of something called the Oxyrhynchus hymn. This is actually the oldest Christian hymn that includes musical notation. Have some very old songs embedded in the New Testament. Like sections of Colossians and Philippians are believed to be hymns that were sung together in early Christian gatherings, and Paul is using them. He's quoting them in his letters.
Speaker 1:But of course, we don't know what they sounded like. Well, when the Oxyrhynchus was discovered in 1918, it came with the original musical notation from the turn of the fourth century. So what you're gonna hear here was sung and recorded by a choir in France a few years ago, but this is a song that was composed some seventeen hundred years ago. What they're saying here is to the father of the universe, father of time, let us all sing together the blessings of the world. The blessings of God not be lost neither in the evening nor in the morning.
Speaker 1:The stars, bearers of light, and the springs of the impetuous rivers no longer keep silent. All while we celebrate in our hymns, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Let all the properties of creation in tone in this refrain. Amen. Amen. Strength, praise, eternal glory to the only dispenser of all that is good.
Speaker 1:Amen. Amen. Now, we're probably not gonna start singing that on Sundays. I'm not sure we have the chops to pull it off, but there is something important in recognizing just how diverse the Christian story is. Not only in our language, but in the belief that human culture and human creativity are fundamental expressions of God's goodness.
Speaker 1:You see, just as faith is about surrendering ourselves to God, worship is just as equally about surrendering ourselves to each other. And I know that might sound strange, but this is exactly what liturgy is about. Liturgy is this word that we use for the structure and the shape and the form of our gatherings. But the word literally means the work of the people. And that means that liturgy is what we shape together as we gather.
Speaker 1:But it is not the lowest common denominator between us. It's not all the stuff we agree on, it's all the stuff we collectively bring into the community. In first Corinthians, Paul goes on this rant about the church as a body and how each person plays a unique role in that body. It's language that's tied to our giftings and about how we bring them to the community and surrender them to each other. He says that one person is a hand and another is an eye.
Speaker 1:Another might be a foot or a thumb or an ear and all of them are necessary. You may have heard that before. In first Corinthians, Paul says in chapter 12, the eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you. The head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. On the contrary, these parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.
Speaker 1:The parts we think are less honorable, we treat with special honor. God has put the body together so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts might have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers. If one part is honored, then every part rejoices with it. Again, there's a good chance you've heard of that before, but what you may not have heard of is the Asclepion.
Speaker 1:Now, Asclepius was the Greek god of healing and medicine. And he was that guy who carried around a rod with a snake that wound itself around it. It's why you might see that on medical symbols today. But in Torrance, there was a temple dedicated to Asclepius called the Asclepion. And what people would do is they would come to that temple and they would have these terracotta plaster mold made of their body parts that needed healing.
Speaker 1:And those molds would then be stored in the temple and the priests would be paid by the people to pray to Asclepius for their healing. This is an actual image of ancient molds that have been discovered throughout the ruins of the Asclepion in Corinth and then gathered and being prepared for museums today. But what this means is that if you're a Corinthian, reading this letter from Paul and hearing him speak of the futility of disembodied parts, this is more than just a neat metaphor for the church. This is something you see in religious circles around you all the time. First of all, notice the beauty of the way that Paul communicates.
Speaker 1:I think that sometimes his words can feel kinda cold and distant to us, but that's often because we don't live in the world that he lives in. For those that did, his images, his language, his attempts to touch them where they live were probably received very differently. But look at this image behind me and then take Paul's language of bodies coming together and coming alive and set them against that imagination of a temple down the street that is filled with all of these lifeless plaster casts of body parts. And you'll start to get a better sense of what he's driving at. This isn't just about everyone playing their part like some cog in the machine.
Speaker 1:This is about the difference between a lifeless religious system and a community of conscience that pulses with variety and vibrancy and difference. And this, Paul intimates, is where our healing comes from. Listen to what he says in verse 26. He says, if one part suffers, every part suffers. If one part is honored or gloried, made splendid or whole, that word is then every part celebrates with it.
Speaker 1:So knowing he's using the images that are drawn from the Asclepion, the temple of healing, together with the fact that he lands this section on the ideas of our suffering and glory, I think it's fair to say that Paul is working really hard here to shift the Corinthian imagination of wholeness. This is Paul saying that we heal each other when we value each other well. Now, what does any of that have to do with our singing? Well, it has to do with the fact that when we gather to sing, we surrender ourselves to each other. We welcome someone else's words into our mouth.
Speaker 1:We honor someone else's creativity and style. We sing someone else's story of the divine, and we heal each other in that surrender. Look, I know it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal, but where else in your life do you give yourself over to someone else's imagination in this way? It's important because it's a metaphor for something deeper, the idea that we are fundamentally in it together. So here in this room, we sing songs written in community.
Speaker 1:We sing songs written in Australia. We sing songs written centuries ago. We sing songs that we like, and we sing songs that we don't. We sing songs that we're good at, and we sing songs that honestly we can't quite pull off. But we do it all together with each other and for each other.
Speaker 1:And in that, we actually begin to heal each other. And this is why it is actually really important that you not like everything we do in church. Because choosing to step outside of ourselves and our choices and our curated playlists and into someone else's expression of faith to work to create a rhythm and a harmony between your story and their story. Between my story and our story, this is one of the primary functions of liturgy. It reminds us that in Christian community, we are bound by more than our taste.
Speaker 1:We are bound by more than our ideas and our theology. We are bound and made whole by our being together. Look. As much as I love going to a Pearl Jam concert at the Saddle Dome and I have been to many, that is not a body. That is an escape on full of right arms who love the same songs from the same band in the same way, and it's great.
Speaker 1:But when we come and we sing and we surrender ourselves to each other in a way that we rarely do anywhere else, this is far more healing than we realize. Because our singing is about more than our songs. It's about the way we surrender to each other, and it's about the way we speak for each other. Because I don't know if you have ever experienced this, but I'll go out on a limb here and name it for myself. There are times when I come into church and I simply do not believe what I'm singing.
Speaker 1:I walk in here frustrated. I walk in here hurting. I walk in here questioning my commitment or my role or my fitness to lead this community. And honestly, all of that hits home this week. Look, I mean, I'm someone with a pretty high risk tolerance, who left a steady job to start this church five years ago, and I have lived most of my life with a level of uncertainty that I'm at peace with.
Speaker 1:This week, waiting for decisions that were outside my control, decisions that would inevitably affect our community and people that I care about, a team that I'm really proud of, all of that has been incredibly tough. And the truth is I have been living on muscle relaxants all week just to keep my jaw from seizing up when I sleep at night with anxiety. And so to walk in and be met with songs that speak to some of the highest ideals of my faith, that can be strangely disorienting at times. And I don't know if you have ever felt this, but I have found the words on the screen bitter in my mouth as we sing at times. And that's okay.
Speaker 1:The scriptures say, why, oh Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? They say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from listening to the groaning of my heart? So there's scripture and there's song to give voice to all of the grief and the anxiety that we carry in our bodies, and that's good.
Speaker 1:But then there are those moments where you are hurting, And life is difficult, and someone has betrayed you, and circumstances don't make sense, or someone you love deeply is sick, and you can't understand why, and you struggle in that moment to find the strength to see the beauty that surrounds you always. And you need someone else to do it for you. And don't misunderstand me. It's important to grieve. It's necessary that you mourn.
Speaker 1:Lament is a fundamental expression of the truth of a world that is not yet made right. A part of why we gather and we stand and we sing of God's goodness together is so that when you can't see it, you stand beside someone who does. And look, I get it. Sometimes someone else's optimism is the most unwelcome thing in your despair. But when we gather and we sing and we commit ourselves to a story that we hope for, part of what we are doing is we are allowing each other to speak hope for each other.
Speaker 1:And when I can't sing, you sing for me. And when you can't celebrate, I celebrate for you. And when we can't believe, then we believe for each other, and in that we heal each other. Because here's the secret that no one wants to tell you in church on a Sunday, you won't be able to trust a story this good for an entire lifetime. That's not how faith works.
Speaker 1:Because there are ups and there are downs, and you weren't meant to be strong enough on your own. Because a church is not a collection of discarded parts abandoned in the temple. It is a body that is being pulled together to serve each other and to be for each other what we're not on our own. See, here in this room, on any given Sunday, there are people who believe and there are people who don't. There are people who grieve, and there are people full of joy.
Speaker 1:There are people who trust everything, and there are people who wonder if they will ever trust again. And in all of that mix is all of the beauty of a community that is designed to sing for each other. And so when you struggle to sing on a Sunday, know that it's okay to sit back and listen instead. And when you walk into this room and you are ready to burst with joy over everything that God has done in you and through you, then know that your song is for the person beside you as well, regardless of whether you struggle to keep a tune. Because in this moment, this is my prayer.
Speaker 1:That our habit of singing together can carry more than a melody, but instead it might actually carry us fearlessly into the spaces that we struggle to enter all on our own. Singing is about a lot more than just our songs. Let's pray. God, for all of the habits in our lives, the unspoken, unconscious rhythms that betray what we really trust, The habits that we lean into, like confession, when we share our story and we speak our truth unashamed, knowing we are welcomed. For the habits that we participate in together, Speak to something bigger, that unite us together in a story that extends beyond our particular moment, that reaches back two thousand years and all the way forward to kingdom.
Speaker 1:God, might we sense your spirit in and through it all. Speaking grace, bringing peace, pulling us together so that we might heal each other. God, might we sing well, and in that might we surrender to each other, and in that might we speak grace to each other, and in that might we heal each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.