Jeremy Duncan: Part of the gospel message, part of the way these stories are crafted for us is to remind us that you aren't the center of the universe, but you do have the universe's attention. God cares about your story. Alright. We're continuing our fall launch series, How I Hold on to Faith. And 2 weeks ago, I talked about questions and doubt, and I had the chance to spend a bit of time reframing this Christian metaphor of being born again.
And I know that sermon was helpful for a number of you. You reached out to me. Thank you for that. And so this week, I went back, and I added some more thoughts, and I posted a video to our YouTube channel expanding on that sermon. If you're interested, you can check that out later.
But make sure that you're subscribed at youtube.com/commonschurch, because we are regularly posting content there, not just our livestream, but all kinds of stuff that we're working on throughout the week as a team. So check that out. Today, though, we're going to talk about music and worship and prayer and the felt experience of faith, all the emotion that goes into it, something that I think a lot of us struggle with when it comes to holding on to faith for the long haul. 1st though, I do want to look back at last week, where Bobbi walked us through a conversation about friendship. And I really appreciated the way she tackled that conversation.
Because friendship as a metaphor for faith can be, let's be honest, wonderful, but also a little intimidating. Right? I mean, how many of us are actually able to consider Jesus a friend in our lives? I mean, sometimes I do, certainly. But the truth is sometimes that feels a little too abstract and distant for me.
Truth is sometimes it's hard for me to pretend that I can have a conversation with Jesus the way that I can with you over a coffee. That's okay for a pastor to say it. Right? And yet that invitation to think of my faith as a friendship, To understand that my trust and my beliefs can grow and develop over time. They can even ebb and flow like a friendship, and even feel distant for a season, and yet also be the kind of warm embrace I can slide my way back into when I'm ready just like a good friend.
That does feel, in a lot of ways, true to my experience of faith. And this actually came up in the Q and R on Sunday night after the sermon, but I was reflecting on some of the friendships in my life. People who have been very important to me, but their faith journey has also been very different from mine over the years. And we haven't always followed the same path, and we haven't always ended up in the same places. And yet, through all of that change in all of our lives, we have remained friends.
In fact, these are relationships that mean a great deal to me to this day. And that willingness to allow my friendships to evolve on their own, and to allow those people that I love to have their own story that I don't get to control for them, that does strangely feel, if I can say it this way, sacred when I map it to my experience of faith. I don't always get to control it. I can't always tell myself what to feel or how to think. My faith sometimes feels like it has its own life of its own.
And yet I have learned to love that story even when it hasn't unfolded the way I might have chosen for it. And I think part of that is that because I know my faith, like a good friend, will always be there when I find my way back to it. That gives me the space for it to ebb and flow and evolve and change. And I think for me, maybe that has taken just a little bit of the pressure enough to keep me moving forward even when I might otherwise want to turn back. So I like faith as friend.
But there's the other side of friendship and faith too. Right? Because I know without a doubt that a lot of my faith today is built on, maybe even predicated on, the ways that people around me, my friends, a lot of them people that I work with, have offered me new perspectives, new language, new ways of holding on to faith that I simply could not have invented for myself. Like it or not, in my experience, faith is a team sport. And so I am greedy for teammates who will help me think in new ways and help me hold on to my faith for the long haul, which, by the way, is we think one of the great parts of commons.
This is a really special community to get to play a role like this in, because it's pretty unique to have a community that can continue to explore faith with you this way. So thanks for all of that that you've offered to me. Today though, we are going to talk about worship, emotion, and prayer, all of our unnecessary anecdotes of faith, and how all of that lived experience fits into our journey. But first let's pray. God of grace and peace, who has created a world of possibility and a universe of potential for each of us, might we embrace your invitation to continue learning and exploring, to resist old conclusions that close the doors, and instead to open ourselves to new ideas as you reveal them to us.
Yet through it all, might we trust that you continue to walk with us near us, guiding us by your spirit, helping us to find our path throughout this life. May goodness and kindness, welcome and peace lead us always to trust in your love. And may that become the guiding star that marks out our path in the world. For those of us today, just beginning this story, exploring your way, would you grant us courage and wisdom, enough light to stay in step with you? And for those of us who have been long on the journey, perhaps at times lulled into a sense of complacency by familiarity, would you grant us curiosity to push in new directions toward your love?
Expand our imagination of all the ways that you are present to us, around us, even now. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. We have talked about our doubts, and we have explored our friendships.
Today, we're gonna tackle that felt experience of faith. And for that, we want to cover relationship and religion, vegetarians and bacon, Jesus and his nicknames, and finally, a ridiculous race. But first, I want to talk about this for a second because my formative experiences of faith have largely come from within what we might call the evangelical tradition. And there's a lot of that that I love. There are so many elements of things that I have learned through my experiences with various evangelical churches that are very much part of commons, and how we express ourselves today.
But one of the things I've always had a bit of a love hate relationship with is this idea, or maybe this implication really, that faith has to be something you feel in your heart all the time. So much of my experience of church has been built around this expectation that all the music we sing, all the language that we use has to land emotionally for it to, like, really count. And you may have heard this one before. Right? Relationship.
Christianity is a relationship, not a religion. I mean, I embrace that. Of course, I do in some sense. Right? I just talked about how my faith can feel like a friendship for me.
But at the same time, I think one of the saving graces of my faith is that Christianity has also been able to be a religion for me, a set of practices, and rhythms, a community that I choose to participate in specifically when sometimes the relationship side just doesn't feel as real as it once did. In fact, I would offer that Christianity as religion, as community that I participate in to order my life around values that transcend my emotions, that has actually been just as important to me over the years as my relationship with God. I remember talking with my son. It was about a year ago now, And I was picking him up after school. And on that day, he had been comparing dietary practices with some of his friends in class.
And I have no idea how that started, but he found out that one of his friends didn't eat bacon. And so he said to me, Dad, we don't eat bacon because we're vegetarians, but my friend doesn't eat bacon because he's Muslim. Are Christians allowed to eat bacon? And so I started into a bit of a history lesson about dietary restrictions and Christian practice. And I was building up to this big landing where I was going to tell him that in Christian pracstics, nothing that goes into you, nothing you eat can make you unclean.
What matters is what comes out of you, how you treat the people around you. And he said, I'm not interested in any of that, dad. I just want to know if Christians can eat bacon. And I said, yes. Maybe a little deflated.
I wasn't going to get the way I wanted. But then he asked me, well, I'm a vegetarian. Am I also a Christian? And I realized that was the real conversation that day. And so I said to him, well, eventually you'll have to decide that for yourself.
That's part of the beauty of Christianity. You're never forced to be here. But until then, yeah, you are a Christian. Because that's the story. That's the tradition through which our family explores who God is and understands how God has been revealed to humans.
You get to choose for yourself, but you're also part of a family and community and tradition that counts, even while you're figuring it out for yourself. And the truth is, looking back, what I realize now maybe a little bit is that I think I was saying that as much to myself as I was to my son, even at 46, even as a pastor, even as someone who has very much chosen this story for myself. My faith is both the relationship that holds me and the religion that forms me. And that's not to diminish my affinity for God. In fact, that's exactly what I want to talk about today, all of our felt experience of the divine.
But I do think sometimes, at least within the evangelical tradition, our language can at times diminish the full scope of what it means to follow the way of Jesus in the world. There are times I feel very close to God, and I pray to God. I feel even like I hear from God in terms of determining my steps and guiding my choices. But perhaps the majority of what I might call my faith is really about ordering my life around the teachings of the person who I believe is the truest representation of divine character. And the closest I will ever come to understanding God, this side of eternity.
And the thing is, the emotion that I would associate with that expression of my faith is probably something like conviction, or purpose, maybe even courage on a good day, but not necessarily the kind of romanticized emotions that often get a lot of our attention within our gathered worship experiences. Now, again, don't get me wrong. It is beautiful to be caught up in a moment of worship, and to raise your hands, and to feel the presence of Spirit, to give yourself over to that encounter. But anecdotally, I know that for a lot of us here in this room, particularly, though not exclusively men here in this room, the felt experience of faith has often been talked about in ways that are maybe a little bit too narrow, in ways that are not fully reflective of the breadth and the depth with which the new testament talks about our relationship to Jesus in all kinds of different ways. The thing is I don't only feel my faith in my heart.
Sometimes I do. But sometimes I feel it in my gut or in my intellect or in my conviction for the kind of man, the kind of person that I want to become. All of that is valid. And it's that combination that makes me feel like I can hold on to all of this for the long haul because it's actually the breadth of experience that feels robust enough to carry me through the ups and downs in some of my emotions. And to talk about that today, I I wanna go to kind of an interesting passage.
It's one that we've talked about before, but I want to come at it from a slightly different angle today. In this series we've been in the book of John a lot. Both Bobby and I have turned there in the last 2 weeks. So why don't we return again today? This is John chapter 20.
And interestingly, we're going to pick up right where we left off with Nicodemus when he collected the body of Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea 2 weeks ago. This is 20, starting in verse 1. Early on the 1st day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, look, they've taken the Lord out of the tomb. We don't know where they have put Him.
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but didn't go in. And then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head.
The cloth that was still lying in its place separate from the linen. Finally, the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went inside. He saw, and he believed. And a couple interesting parts here. First, though, we have this disciple Jesus loved.
And maybe we should start there. I mean, what's up with that? Right? Well, there's a couple of different ways we can think about this. First, I guess it's possible that Jesus just really liked this dude and went around reminding everyone of it regularly.
Like, hey, everyone. These are my friends. This is Peter, John. You know Matthew. And, of course, the guy I love.
I mean, that's not totally out of pocket for Jesus to give some wild nicknames. Peter was a nickname. He took a guy named Cephas and started calling him the rock. He had a pair of brothers that he called the sons of thunder. Even Mary Magdalene, who started this passage, traditionally, her name has been understood as a reference to her geography, Mary of Magdala.
But at the time she was around the town of Magdala, as we know today, it wasn't actually called that. It was likely called a Megadan in the 1st century, and possibly was renamed a Magdala specifically because of Mary's notoriety. And if that's the case, then the name Mary Magdalene probably comes from the Aramaic word, Magdala, which meant tower. As in Mary, the tower of strength. After all, she's the one going to the tomb to tend to Jesus' grave while all the men are hiding in the basement.
So it was pretty common for Jesus to notice something about someone and to name that uniqueness for them. I really like that, by the way. I've never really had a nickname. They call me Slam Duncan for about 12 days in junior high, but that never really stuck. So I'd like to know what Jesus would come up with for me.
By the way, you don't have to make up weird nicknames for your friends, but you absolutely can tell them what you appreciate about them. I need to do that more. I'm going to try. Let's do it together. Still, I tend to doubt that the beloved disciple really was ever a nickname that Jesus used for anyone.
That feels a little uncomfy. In fact, scholarly consensus seems to be that this is a nickname the author has given himself, which presents some unique challenges. Because generally, we think that John was the last gospel written, possibly quite late in the 1st century, which likely means the author was not an eyewitness to Jesus, not one of the original disciples at all. And that means that if he has given himself this nickname, then he is writing himself into the story as a literary device, almost as an avatar for us as readers to imagine ourselves as if we were part of the story too. That means that as you read John, you are in a very real way the beloved disciple.
I am the beloved disciple. This author wants all of us who have come in the years and centuries, even millennia after Jesus walked the earth and still found ourselves gripped by his life to know that we are there in the story, we are all the beloved disciple. In fact, I think this author wants us to know that our experience of Jesus is in some way on par with every other experience of Jesus throughout history. And there's something quite compelling about that, I think, this democratizing of Jesus that the early church participated in. I mean, even Paul does something similar in his own way.
Right? Like, he claims to have encounter with the risen Christ. But if you read the story, it's a spiritual encounter that no one around him sees. And yet in his mind, that encounter places him on equal footing with the disciples who walked and talked and ate with with Jesus. And that actually seems important to me.
That the early Christian community resisted the urge to play the degrees of separation game. Paul can be an apostle. The author can be part of the story. Your encounter with Jesus 1000 of years later, as unique as your journey through this world, it is just as valid as Peter the Rock, James and John the sons of thunder, and maybe even Mary the tower. Have a lot well, sometimes not.
Sometimes, we we handle that well, sometimes not. Sometimes we grasp for attention in the worst possible ways. But hopefully, it's something we make peace with as we grow. At least I hope so, because my daughter who is 4 years old right now is just discovering that she's not always the center of attention. To be fair, she has been for all of her life so far.
But now, anytime mom and dad want to have a conversation, it's her cue to make some noise, or jump in the middle, or find her way into that moment. God forbid, mom and dad should be able to laugh at anything without her approval. But part of the gospel message, part of the way these stories are crafted for us is to remind us that you aren't the center of the universe, but you do have the universe's attention. God cares about your story. And that feels like something I could build my identity around.
Still, I want to look at the details of this narrative as John tells it. Early on the 1st day, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, look, they've taken our Lord out of the tomb. We don't know where they've put Him. So Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb, and both were running.
But the other disciple, that's me, the one that Jesus loved. I was on my game that day, so I let my feet fly. And I outran Peter and reached the tomb first. By a mile, actually, he was very slow. Still, when I got there, I bent over, and I looked in at the strips of linen.
But for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to step across the threshold. So here I was, frozen outside when Simon Peter finally comes along behind me. Remember, I was much vaster than him. I always was. Jesus loved that about me.
But Peter finally got there. And remarkably, he goes in without any hesitation straight into the tomb. He sees the strips of linen lying there, just as I had. He sees the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head, just as I saw. And it was still there lying in its place, separate from the linen when he turns back to look at me.
And so finally, I, who had run much harder and much faster and who'd reached the tomb first, whose heart and lungs were beating their way out of my chest, who was terrified and ecstatic about the possibility of what all of this could mean, I finally went inside. And I saw, and in that moment, I think maybe really for the very first time, I trusted my friend Jesus in everything he had said. Like, it's one of those moments where the beauty of it almost covers up the absurdity of it. And I know you've heard this before. I've talked about this before from this stage.
But here's what I want you to notice about this story today. The beloved disciple. The disciple who writes himself into the story, resting his head on Jesus' chest in chapter 13. The disciple who for most of this gospel is meant carry the weight of representing the deepest, most affectionate, most personal relationship to Jesus that any of us can have. Here in this climax, this pivotal moment where He's about to encounter resurrection, that disciple frames this moment in terms of a footrace and a physical hesitation to step inside the tomb.
And for me, it's like all of the emotion, the love, the relationship of the story, all of it that has been building throughout all of the gospel now gets poured out in physicality. And it's not tears, although there's nothing wrong with tears. And it's not worship, although there's nothing wrong with worship. It's not in being overcome with emotion, though there's nothing wrong with being overcome by emotion. But here in this pivotal moment, the character that is there to ground all of our emotional connection to Jesus expresses this moment in burning legs, and beating chest, and fighting with His body to take one more step toward the hope that terrifies Him most.
Here's the thing, faith is not objective. It's not, I'm sorry, it's subjective. It's personal, and it's anecdotal. It's weird stories about beating your friend in a footrace to the tomb. It's conversations with your son about bacon.
It's the moment where you know beyond any doubt that God showed up in your life, but you also know that if you told that story to anyone around you, they would look at you with blank stares, or worse. But at the end of the day, your faith is really nothing more than a collection of unnecessary anecdotes just like it was with the beloved disciple, and yet here's what I want you to see today. Your anecdote can be as emotional as laying your head on the chest of Jesus. Your anecdote can be as physical as being out of breath racing your friend to see what's happened. Your anecdote can be hesitating to take the final step to give yourself over to faith.
Your anecdote can be the way Christian community has surrounded you and held you and helped you keep your values even when you struggle to believe in them for yourself. Your anecdote can be an experience of God so uniquely bizarre it makes absolutely no sense to anyone else why it matters to you. But this is the point. Faith is a lived experience, and your lived experience can be as perfectly unique as you are. So while it is beautiful to listen to the stories around you and to expand your imagination by hearing about how others experience the divine, there is less than zero value in comparing all of your unnecessary anecdotes to anyone else's.
Your faith doesn't need to look like theirs. Your emotions don't need to express the way the person beside you does. And so whether you're laying your head on the chest of Jesus or racing your friend toward your hope, whatever feels more descriptive of your experience of faith, just know your anecdote counts. See, here's how I hold on to faith. I come to church, and I sing even when I don't really feel like it.
And I pray sometimes even when I don't want to. I push myself to follow the way of Jesus even when I'm struggling to. But it is not because I'm trying to live up to anyone else's expectation of what faith should look like. It's because I have my own unnecessary anecdotes, personal stories of ridiculous races that remind me that this story is worth leaning into. And there has been enough gravity in that lived experience to keep me holding on.
And I think sometimes, if we allowed ourselves to believe in our own personal anecdotes without measuring them against how the person beside us expresses their faith story, their faith journey, their emotion of being connected to Jesus, we might realize there's more gravity in our story than we had realized to begin with. Let's pray. God, for all the ways that you show up in our lives, in our hearts, in our intellect, in our gut, in our conviction, in our physicality, burning legs as we move ourself forward in the world and in faith, might we trust that those experiences are real, and they are as valid as the experiences of faith that we often hold up and magnify and compare ourselves against. Might we trust that your spirit is active in us and around us all the time. And that when we notice you, even in ways that someone else might not acknowledge, When we can grab it and hold it and internalize it, it can create a sense of gravity in our lives that can keep us holding on to faith for the long haul.
Might we know that the measure of our faith is our connection to you regardless of what it looks like, not how we compare to anyone else's story. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. 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 at commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.church/discord 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.