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. Today, we're in the middle of a series called the old songs, and we're looking at the hymns and poems that are buried throughout our New Testament texts.

Now, some of those have to be teased out a little bit. There are no citations in the New Testament, unfortunately. Thankfully though, there's a whole area of study that's called source critical theory, and that's dedicated to uncovering the sources behind a text or a writing. And so we're relying on a lot of that work that's done by scholars to help us identify and talk about these ancient hymns so that we can talk about where they fit in Christian community. And so far in this series, we have looked at the place of hymns and songs in community, we have looked at the poetic composition that opens the Gospel of John, and then last week, we looked at a section known as the Colossian hymn.

Now, Bobby took us through that one, but we're actually gonna lean on that conversation today because we're gonna see very similar themes referenced by Paul in Ephesians as well. But looking back quickly at the Colossian hymn here, one of the things you notice right away, or at least I do, is that this section shares a lot with what we saw in John one. If you remember back two weeks ago, the opening prologue of the Gospel of John, the writer of John takes the glory of creation and the searching of Greek philosophy and the Hebrew tradition of Lady Wisdom and folds it all together to point us to Jesus. His point here is that God has always been speaking. We can encounter God everywhere, but now in Christ, God has said everything God wants to say to humanity.

Do we have stuff questions? Of course, do. Are there still mysteries for us to marvel over? Absolutely. Will we have all of our answers about God that we could possibly want?

Probably not. But we have everything that we need to know, everything we need to see, everything that it takes for us to walk the path of peace in the world. All of that is present to us in the person of Jesus, the final capital w word of God. But, that's a very big picture view of the Jesus story, isn't it? A lot of Jesus' teachings, an example, are pretty down to earth, practical reminders to love each other well.

John, it's like he pulls back the camera and says, actually, all of that is the truth of the universe. Well, the Colossian hymn last week comes right back to those same themes. Jesus says, or John says, Jesus is the word, the voice of creator. If you want to hear God, listen to Jesus. The Colossian hymn says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

If you want to see God, look at Jesus. And that word image is the word icon in Greek. It's related to the idea of an idol or a representation of God in the world, and this hymn says you don't need an idol anymore. You have the actual image of the divine with you. Last week, in Colossians, we read, in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, all things were created through him and for him.

Remember John's prologue, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made. Same idea. Last week in Colossians we read, for God was pleased to have divine fullness dwell in Jesus and through him to reconcile all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven. John says, the true light that gives light to everyone was coming to the world.

And to all he gave the right to become children of God. So, both of these hymns are exploring very similar ideas, this large scale imagination of Jesus. In fact, here, in Colossians, you have all things created in Christ, and then you have all things reconciled through Christ. It's the same word, panta or all in both stanzas of the poem. So, that's an inclusio, that's the term.

All things come from God through Jesus. All things return to God through Jesus. By the way, that means not just people or souls or spirits, but all things. So God intends to heal it all, minds and bodies and rivers and streams and birds and galaxies alike. This is a very big picture view of Jesus.

Think of it this way. God is infinite love, and therefore God absolutely cannot look at you or me or an earthworm with anything less than perfect redemptive love. But, why is this important? Why is it important today in particular? It's important because it shows us that very early in the Christian story, even before we had a scripture, far before we figured out any type of doctrine or explanation for Trinity, we were already recognizing that the peaceful path of Jesus, the way of love through the world, were more than just neighborly ambitions.

It was the way that God intended to heal everything. That love was far stronger than we had realized, that Jesus was more than just a profound teacher. He was an expression of the truth that sits behind the universe. As Bobby prayed last week, Christ of the cosmos, sing your song over flourishing, over all of us. And what's fascinating today is that Paul is going use another hymn, one that carries the very same ideas of the expansiveness of the Jesus story, but he's going to use that to bring us all the way back to the start, the way that we live our neighbours.

First though, let's pray. God of all good songs, whose love and truth and care and grace are woven throughout all of our best compositions, Might we slowly come to see all of the goodness that surrounds us always, and through that awareness to connect with the source of all such grace. For those of us today who are struggling because we are gripped by fear and lament, we ask that even in this, your spirit would be close, and that as you grieve with us and near to us, new songs might softly arise in us. For those of us captured by your way today, but struggling to walk out peace in our relationships and our neighborhoods, We ask that your spirit would draw near with guidance for us. Not endeavor in condemnation or burden or fear, but in the wisdom to know how and when and where to walk.

Light the path ahead of us one step at a time, and we will do our best to follow. And finally, for those of us who are bursting with song today, gratitude overflowing. We ask for that perspective to continue to expand within us to see not only our own experience here in this moment right now, but your love for all, your intent to heal all, your conviction that a seed of neighbor love can transform everything. May our thankfulness turn into generosity. May our gratitude transform into welcome.

And in that, might we encounter you all over again. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today, we're going to Ephesians two, and we're gonna talk about hallelujahs, Christology, finding the lyrics, and getting them all in the right order.

But before we talk about songs for a moment, in particular, I want to talk about how a song takes root in our collective consciousness. Because interestingly, two weeks ago, I talked about my love for Kendrick Lamar. Lo and behold, this week, he dropped a new album for us. Now, it's awesome. To be fair, it's a little rough at times.

So if you're gonna put it on around the kids, put the earmuffs on. However, listen to a few of these lyrics. Celebrate new life when it comes back around. The purpose is in the lessons we're learning now. I wasn't perfect.

The skin I was in had truly suffered. Temptation and patience, everything the body nurtures. So face your fears. I always knew I would make it here. Where energy is magnified and persevered, consciousness is synchronized and crystal clear.

Euphoria is glorified when it is made his. That's good stuff. Although, we're not talking about Kendrick today. We're actually talking about Leonard Cohen. And when I say Leonard Cohen, what is the song that you all think about?

Right? There's more than a few good ones, but I'm gonna guess it's Hallelujah that jumps to mind. I know you've heard this song. Right? I've heard there was a secret chord that David played, it pleased the Lord, but you don't really care for music, do you?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls, the major lifts, the baffled king composing Hallelujah. It's a great song. Right? Thing is, it wasn't always. Cohen wrote this song, and he loved it, but his record company did not.

They actually refused to put it on the album that he originally wrote it for. Undaunted, Cohen decided to release the song separately through an independent label, and that's when the song did terribly. Nobody liked the song. Nobody bought it. It was a bomb.

Cohen liked it though, so he kept working on it. And he kept writing more lyrics for it, and he kept performing it live, much to the chagrin of his record company. And so a few years later, he does the song in a bar, and a Welsh singer in the audience named John Cale hears it and loves it and asks Cohen if he can cover it. Cohen says, sure, and sends it over. And by this time, he has 15 pages of lyrics for this song.

It's grown into a monster by now. So Cale edits it and cuts it down and records a version of it. He releases the song, and everybody still hates it. Nobody buys it. It ends up getting dumped onto a Leonard Cohen tribute album that also almost nobody bought.

Except somebody bought it, obviously. And in fact, a Remendum woman bought it, and she had a house sitter, and he was a musician. And one day he listened to the album in her home, and he loved the song, so he decides to record a version for his upcoming album. Now, that was Jeff Buckley. And you've probably heard that version of the song before.

It's haunting, it's beautiful, it's very famous, but what you might not know is that that version of the song, well that flopped too. In fact, his album sold almost no copies, nobody liked it, it went nowhere. Sadly, three years later, Buckley drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River. And in part because of that, his music began to find a following. And so six years after that, his version of the song Hallelujah hit the chart for the very first time.

Two years after that, in 2005, eight years after Buckley had died, twenty one years after Cohen had written the song, Hallelujah went platinum for the first time. Now, why are we talking about all this? One, because I think it's interesting, but two, because it illustrates something really powerful about the way that music embeds itself in our collective consciousness. Songs don't become hits just because they're good. Popularity is not a meritocracy.

If it were, Hallelujah would have been a hit the time when Cohen released it. We would all recognize that Katie Lang's version of the song is the best version of the song. It's amazing. Those songs become hits because they connect with the public when a number of different factors coalesce together. So quality, sure, it has to be good, but also narrative and zeit geist and resonance with what is happening at that moment in the world, all of this has to be part of a platinum record.

Even silly songs like Gangnam Style or Who Let the Dogs Out, they tell you something about that moment in time. The hymns in the New Testament are no different. There's a reason that they all take on these same types of Christological questions. They all tend to pull back the camera to take in the Christ story from the perspective of the cosmos. And it's because the early Christian community was absolutely compelled by the way of Jesus.

They the path that he took in the world, the way that he taught them to love each other, they were confounded by that, but then he died. And that could have been the end of it. I think the gospels show us that a lot of the disciples actually thought that was the end of it, except it wasn't. Because resurrection and Easter demonstrated that this peaceful way of neighbor love to the world was more than just kindness. It was somehow alive.

And it was proof that the way of God, when actually embodied in the human story, was somehow utterly unstoppable. And so the question and the wrestle in the earliest years of the church was not the theology of Trinity or the doctrine of the nature of God. That would all come in time. But first, it was this incredible explosion of Christological poetry, attempts to express the radical notion that the way of Jesus had somehow changed everything. That was the zeitgeist.

It's why you get John talking about the logos of God. It's why you get Colossians talking about the icon of God. It's why you get Philippians talking about the kenosis of God. We'll get there in two weeks. These are not fully formed theological arguments.

This is a poetic fascination with the unexpected scope of the Jesus story. And they're all reflective of that particular moment. This shocking realization that Jesus is much bigger than we thought. Now, what's fascinating here in Ephesians is that Paul is gonna use that same preoccupation with the expansiveness of the Jesus story, but he's gonna use that to point us back to each other. So, let's turn to Ephesians two.

I'm gonna read a longer section here. And as I do, here's the game. You try to figure out what you think the poetry is here, because it's kind of buried in this section So this is starting in verse 11. Therefore, remember that you formerly, who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, which is done in the body by human hands, remember that at the time you were separated from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of the promise without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who are once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, he who was made, the two groups won and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. By setting aside in his flesh the law, with its commands and regulations, his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of two, thus making peace. And in one body, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to those who were far away and peace to those who were near to God. Through him, we both have access to the father by one spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by God's spirit. Now, it's Ephesians two verse 11 right through to the end of verse 22. First off, let me acknowledge here, the poetry is a little harder to spot this time, definitely harder than the first two hymns we've looked at in this series.

So, if you listen true to that and you decide, I'm not sure I buy the idea that this is a hymn, that's totally fair. I'll make my argument, you can decide what you think at the end of that. But the theory here, at least, is that it's verses 14 to 18 that are being brought in as a quote to buttress Paul's argument. And there's a couple reasons for this. First, is that we see a lot of repetition in that section.

Verse 14, for he himself is our peace who made the two groups one. And then in verse 15, his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of two, thus making peace. So we start with peace that makes two groups one, and then that's restated as two groups becoming one that make peace. That's a very specific poetic construction, building up and then back down. Another example.

Verse 14, Christ has destroyed the dividing wall of hostility. Verse 16, the cross has put to death our hostility. One last example here, verse 14, he himself is our peace. Verse 15, his purpose was to make peace. Verse 18, he preached peace to those near.

He preached peace to those far. The theme of peace in Christ that runs through this whole section. However, probably the really big reason that we tend to think this is pre existing material is that if you look at the introductory section that I read, verses 11 to 13, Paul is talking in the second person. So he's bringing up a conflict he wants to address. It's Jewish and Gentile people not getting along, but it's all about you.

Then in verses 14 to 18, he brings in what we think is a song, is a source of authority that he can appeal to, and all of a sudden he switches to we language. Our, we, the pronouns all change for those four verses. Then, when he's done with that, and he wants to give some advice, he says consequently, and he switches back to using you language for verses 19 to 20. It's all about speaking back to the community again. So, if you take the whole section here, you kind of have Paul saying, guys, here's a problem we have to deal with.

Here's a song we all know and sing. Here's my advice how we can move forward together. Now, it's really skillfully done, and that kind of makes the poem harder to spot. But if you track the argument, I think that makes probably the most sense. But the real question here then is, what is Paul trying to say?

And that's where it gets really interesting. Because the song, the hymn, if you pull it out and read those first four verses on their own, it's saying exactly what we would expect it to, given the context that we've already talked about in the early Christian community. This is a hymn about the expansive story of Jesus. Jesus, who preached peace to those who were far from God. Jesus, who preached peace to those who were near to God.

Jesus, who by demonstrating the way of peace, actually formed a new human experience where no one needs to be left on the outside. Point of this song is that no matter what you've been told, no matter how long you've been told it, you no longer need someone to be left out to know that you are loved. In other words, you can be set apart for God, but you are not set apart from anyone anymore. That's what Jesus shows us, the expansive heart of God. And that vision is very much in line with all of the other Christological hymns that we've looked at in this series.

In fact, when verse 16 talks about both groups being reconciled to God, That both in English, that's fine in the context here because Paul is talking about Jew and Gentile. Both make sense. But the word actually doesn't refer to to the way that both does in English. It actually refers to all or everything in view. So it's actually very similar language to what we saw in the Colossian hymns when it says that all things are reconciled to God through Christ.

Okay. So here we've got another example of an expansive Christological hymn, but look at how Paul is using it. He's got a community that is forming around the Jesus story, and it's beautiful, but it's also it's really hard. This this community has been pulled together from disparate groups that have traditionally seen each other as the other. And they want to learn, and they want to grow and evolve, and they want to walk the path of Jesus, but they're struggling to do that together well.

And I have got sympathy for that. It's hard. I've actually been in a series of meetings over the last couple weeks with a number of pastors, and everyone that I talk to is struggling with the fractious nature of the last couple of years. Pastors, at least in my personal network, they are dropping like flies. They're looking for new jobs and new careers all over the place because they aren't sure how to navigate the kind of polarity that we're seeing in society right now.

Sadly, I don't have an answer for that at the scale of society. That's above my pre grade. You'll have to talk to a politician. But at the level of church, my answer is always, it's only ever been a commitment to keeping Jesus at the center. If your church is built on theology, or doctrine, or tradition, or experience, or preference, or politics, eventually you are going to come up against some challenge that charisma can't paper over.

Which is why we have always maintained from the beginning of commons that we will hold no litmus test beyond the commitment to the way of Jesus. Trust me, we fumble that all the time. We stumble over it, in fact. But we have said time and time again that we are not going to start deciding who is in and who is out. If you are committed to the way of peace, if you're willing to let go of patterns that cause harm to those near you, if you're aware of the fact that all of us, we are only beginning to understand how much we have to learn, then you are welcome here regardless of how we might differ.

In fact, those differences, as hard as they are, is what will make community beautiful. But that's hard, and I get that, which is why I love what Paul does here with this poem. Because he sees this hymnity that's been bubbling up through the Christian community. It's expressing the scope and scale of salvation, the way that Jesus has demonstrated, not just away, but has changed the game and fundamentally transformed what it means to be human. But now, in the midst of a conflict, in a community, he quotes the song as if to say, we all know where we're going, but do you see how we get there?

Christ has created in himself one new humanity, thus making peace, And then in that one body, he has reconciled us to God. So this between us, between you and I, is how we get to this between us and God. So here's the thing. In Western culture, we have been primarily shaped in a social climate that has generally held that the individual is the most important unit. And because of that, we've tended to imagine that the way to fix our society is for everyone to fix themselves.

That's led to a very bootstrapped kind of Christianity, where everyone goes away on their own and encounters God and has a change of heart and then comes back better, and that's how you shape community. Except that is not what the earliest expressions of trust in Christ tell us. We are not reconciled to God and then to each other. This hymn says that Christ reconciles us to each other, involves us in the hard work of building community from groups that have been opposed to each other, and that that is what makes possible our reconciliation to God. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, thus making peace, and then in that one body to reconcile all to God through the cross.

And I think too often we imagine that if I can get right with God, that will fix my relationships. Spirit keeps saying, No, make peace with your neighbor, and in that you will uncover the divine. Paul's solution to conflict is to get the story in the right order. Which is why then, coming out of the song, he can say, consequently, because of that, you are no longer foreigners and strangers. You have to stop thinking about yourself that way.

You're not a stranger here. You are now a citizen together, responsible for those near you. You are now a household together, bonded to each other. And whatever it is that you build together, be it a shabby shack or a humble cottage, maybe even a magnificent temple, your shared creation of community, that will become the dwelling place for God as long as Christ is the foundation of it all. And so it's these four simple verses buried in the middle of chapter two of Ephesians that remind us both of the heights of Christian hope.

All things are being reconciled to the creator. But in the hands of a skillful preacher like Paul, are also the reminder of the humble beginnings of that kind of a story. The conviction that the salvation of the cosmos starts with your reconciliation to your neighbor. And that this is how we'll find this. Let's pray.

God who sings good songs over us, who speaks joy and peace and grace and salvation to each of us. May that message somehow sink somewhere deep into our spirit to remind us it's not just between us and you, it is also the ways that we embody your love in the world. That when we engage our neighbors, when we talk to the person who sits beside us in the pew, when we work, even through difficult moments to be reconciled, to live at peace as much as it is possible for us. When we walk your way, we are inviting ourself to know you better. And that God, this disembodied idea of faith, disconnected from the relationships we encounter, this isn't a thing.

It is only your way, your path, your love taking root in us, reconciling us to each other, forcing us to enter into hard conversations with love and grace. That this is how we will be transformed into the likeness of your son, the people you have always imagined us to be. So God, turn us back toward each other. And in that, help us to see you there. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.

Amen.