Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information. Hope

Last week on the fourth Sunday of Lent, Scott walked us through Jesus' teaching on the vine and the branches. And maybe you recall how Scott spoke about the garden that he tends with his wife, Darlene, in their backyard and how they run out into the hail with tarps to protect their tender garden shoots. I mean, if that is not the metaphor we all need for God as a parent, I don't know what is. Imagine that all of your new learning and your new healing and your new steps towards your dreams are protected by the holy tarp of God. Come on.

That's so lovely. In Scott's words, we need the image of vine and branches to trust that we are firmly planted, held, and cared for by the divine gardener. I was so inspired last week that I bought some new seeds for my garden and I planted them, of course, indoors, cause I live in Calgary. I get it. Let's live out our metaphors, shall we?

Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, and while we feel some warmer weather here in Calgary, we still have a stretch ahead of us before Easter. And on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the church enters into what is called deep Lent. And in this week before holy week, we are meant to slow down and make space for grief and contemplate the mystery embedded in these chapters of the Jesus story. They're hard. So today, we pick up in the middle of the conversation Jesus has with his followers before his arrest.

And I don't know about you, but I love listening in on other people's conversations. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing for the people I'm with who say, Bobby, stop listening to slash staring at those strangers, but I love people and I can't turn away. But I checked with Jesus and he's cool with it. We can listen in on this conversation today. It's fine.

So we'll be in John fifteen and sixteen. But before we tune into that, let's quiet our hearts a little bit and let us pray. Loving God, we take a moment to slow down a little, to rest, to consider our needs and your nearness. As we breathe in and out, maybe focusing in this moment on our inhale, we think of the people and places in need of restoration, healing and hope, and we bring that a little closer today. And we pray this deep lent prayer.

Look with compassion, oh Lord, upon your people and your planet that we may learn to know you more fully. And as we breathe in and out, maybe focusing on our exhale or letting go or grounding. We are mindful of our own needs, our restlessness, our work of healing. And so we pray this deep lent prayer. Look with compassion, oh Lord, upon our souls that we may serve you with a more perfect love.

Amen. Our Lent series, book of glory, focuses on the last half of the gospel of John. And we pick up partway through John 15. It's a bit of a crunchy text, meaning some of us may have some misunderstandings, maybe even some resistance to what we read, and it's okay for us to admit that. So today, we'll talk about this question, does the world really hate you?

Death dealing forces, relational ontology, and the verb glorify. We begin in John 15 verse 18, and Jesus speaks to his disciples in what's called the farewell discourse. And it's kinda like this Jerry Maguire mission statement moment where, if you remember the movie, Jerry, a sports agent played by a younger Tom Cruise, writes through the night this manifesto to say to his colleagues, the key to our business is personal relationships. Then Jerry loses all his friends and almost all the athletes that he works with except for Cuba Gooding Jr. Of course, show me the money.

But eventually, Jerry does find love. You complete me. And I realize I leaned really hard into that movie, and it also is a reference that dates me. It's from 1996, but sometimes you need to stay in your pop culture lane. Mine's dramatic rom coms from the nineteen nineties, and I am not sorry about that.

You didn't come here to hear that, did you? Back to the text where Jesus prepares his friends for what's to come. There are parallels if you're looking for it, kind of everywhere. John 15 beginning in verse 18. If the world hates you, keep in mind, it hated me first.

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Okay. If you knew you had, say, a day left to live and you gathered your best friends around a table to hear your mission statement, what would you say?

I bet it wouldn't start with, if the world hates you. You'd probably go with something more along the lines of, like, try to be kind. But let's remember in this farewell teaching so far, Jesus has lovingly washed his disciples feet and told them to do the same for each other. He has clearly seen where his friends are at and given them the respect that they need to follow their own paths. He has comforted them and told them about this expansive future where there is room for all.

He said that following him is following God and that the spirit is a promised and ever present reality. But now we get to this part that feels a little bit prickly. Does the world really hate them? And does that imply that God might hate the world? Well, the word for world here is cosmos, and you'll find it 78 times in the Gospel of John.

And what's unique about the style of John's Gospel is that it has this spiral quality to it, meaning that there are themes and ideas that the writer circles around again and again and again, coming at an idea from one angle and then coming at an idea from another. And one of those ideas is cosmos, which most often means the whole earth. Now in some passages in the gospel, you'll read about God's love for the cosmos, in the famous for God so loved the world in John three sixteen. And you'll read about God's nearness and affection for the earth when the divine word, Jesus, becomes flesh and moves in amongst us. This is a loved cosmos, not a condemned cosmos.

But then John takes us to the other side of the relationship, and this is where we find not reciprocity, but animosity. This is where cosmos is personified in worldly rulers and shadowy forces. So let's talk about this death dealing force as Jesus gets closer and closer to the cross. Picking up in 15 verse 23, whoever hates me hates my father as well. If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin.

As it is, they have seen and yet they have hated both me and my father, but this is to fulfill what is written in the law. They hated me without reason. When the advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the father, the spirit of truth, who goes out from the father, he will testify about me. And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning. All this I have told you so that you do not fall away.

Now, a lot of people think of John as a martyr's text. It's a text meant to reassure people going through a very hard time. See, John says Jesus attaches himself to their idea of God in a way that they can't pull apart. And Jesus says, I came. I did this work.

You were with me. It is holy, so hold on to it. And there's no way to put this work, this Jesus genie back into the bottle. Jesus has put it all out there, how to be human, how to love God, and how to love each other. But access to this way of being doesn't make it easy.

Sometimes, can feel so threatening that people and powerful systems lash out protecting what is vulnerable in them and their hold on power. And we can resist truth with such force that we start to hate, make enemies of everyone, and hate turns us into a shell of ourselves. So let's spin around and take a look at hate, shall we? Why don't we, in the words of one of my favorite songs about Jesus, consider why we put to death the ones we love the most. For John, everything that happens fulfills scripture.

Quoting Psalm 69, Jesus says, they hate me for no good reason. Just when you think you're gonna get an answer. No good reason. Now the Greek word for without reason or cause is dorean. And in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the word is negative.

Like, look at all those haters hating me for no reason. But in the New Testament, dorean, which literally means as a gift, is used positively. In the gospel of Matthew, in Paul's theology, and John's revelation, this word translates as the divine gifts of good news and grace and human flourishing. And in Jesus, these things that seem opposite, a negative and a positive, can end up both being true. There will never be a way to fully explain the depth of evil, the cursedness of destruction, the mystery of hatred.

It is baked in, and we can acknowledge that. But there will always be this way that God takes our hate and our violence and transforms even the worst parts of ourselves into glory, into gift. See, we know death dealing forces. We know structural injustice. We know harmful disasters.

We know lying and cheating and making a mess of it. And we know rejection and unfair critique and horrible lovers. We know meanness and abuse. We know cowardice and corruption. Why?

I had to take my own bad attitude for a walk this week because I know my powerlessness to defeat my pettiness and my stressiness and my mood. Death dealing forces, we know them. They are within and they are without. And when faced with the death dealing force of an empire and a religious system that could not imagine something new and inclusive and evolving, Jesus didn't plot revenge. He didn't dig an escape tunnel.

He didn't arm his followers to fight. When faced with his own fear, his own doubt, I imagine his own relationship with that feeling that there's just not enough time. Jesus just closed the door. He sat down. He looked his friends in the eye.

He answered questions. I like to think maybe he even made a couple jokes. He kept it small and intimate because it was only ever about relationships for Jesus. No death dealing force can extinguish life giving love. So Jesus goes on to say, but very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away.

Unless I go away, the advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. About sin because people do not believe in me, about righteousness because I am going to the father where you can see me no longer, and about judgment because the prince of this world now stands condemned. There's something so profound about what Jesus says at the start of this passage.

Basically, I was never yours to keep. Don't worry though. I won't leave you with nothing. You'll have something to remember me by. I'll give you spirit.

And what does spirit do when the words of the text prove the world wrong about saying righteousness and judgment? Those are big churchy words that can sound a little bit threatening. But let's look on the bright side of sin, shall we? In John, sin is not a moral category. Sin is a lack of faith.

It's rejecting Jesus. It's turning from the source of all that is life giving. And righteousness here can also be translated as justice. It's being open to witness the revelation of what is so good. It's seeing the world through the lens of shalom where nothing is missing and all could be made whole, and judgment is a legal term meaning to decide, as in we decide, like Judas and like Peter, what path we'll take.

And we will live with those consequences. And the bright side of all this, the bright side of sin and justice and judgment, is just how much power you and I have. We can get up every day and welcome the gift, the gift of faith. It can look like awe. It can look like love.

It can look like being at home in your body. But we can also get up every day, and we can reject the gift of faith. We can fool ourselves to believe that our actions don't affect other people. We can lie to ourselves and others. We can not deal with our hurt, and we all know what kind of disaster we risk with that.

See, every part of faith is relational. And over the centuries, Christ followers have shaped a theology with this ultimate claim, God is relational, a divine perichoresis from the Greek word meaning rotation. The priest and theologian Dennis Edwards draws out this divine dance saying if God's being is radically relational, then this suggests that reality is relational to the core. We wait and we wait and we wait for God to show up, to fix the mess, to right the wrong, to clear the confusion. But Jesus already came, taught us our lessons, and we actually have what we need.

We have relationships. You are in relationship with God every breath that you take. You are in relationship with ancestors just noticing your body in this place. You are in relationship with everyone you meet and commit yourself to and love. You are in relationship with the land, with everyone who tended it before you, with everyone who will need it long after you.

You are in relationship and that is sacred. No existential crisis, no ruler of this world, no long dark Lenten journey can ever sever your belonging. Okay. I got a little amped up there. At the end of the teaching we look at today, Jesus says that there is so much more that he'd like to say, but he knows limits.

He knows not to push too hard. So he says, the spirit of truth will guide in truth. And I like Sarah Rudin's translation here, the life breath of truth will lead you on the journey in all truth. So Jesus assures them everything spirit does will glorify. And the verb glorify, doxazo, means to reveal divinity, to make visible so much beauty, to honor stunning reputation.

Doxazo is a promise. The verb is future tense. And Jesus tells his friends, you will still be in relationship with me even after I'm gone. The life breath of truth will lead you. Now more and more theology is making space for what we know about the world, about the cosmos that we live in, taking care with an ecological lens to see our place in an interconnected universe.

I love the work of Ted Myers' watershed theology and Randy Woodley's indigenous vision and Ilya Delio's integration of Christian life in an evolving planet. These voices carefully guide us back to the table where Jesus leaves his disciples to live out their lives without him. But it's not like Jesus was telling them something new. Everything we know has a relationship with time, a beginning, a middle, an end, where one thing dies and makes space for something new. We are an emergent phenomenon from subatomic particles to galaxies to planets to single cell organisms to mammals to consciousness.

We emerge, we change, we adapt. And Jesus senses all of this. He's so clear eyed about it, telling his friends, I came as one of you. I taught you a sacred story. Now you teach each other.

And we get in our heads about what it means to live in relationship with God. Is it studying the bible? Is it going to church? Is it praying before your meal? Sure.

Of course. Have at it. These are great add ons, but I am more and more interested in seamless spirituality, one you're probably living already. Because this is what it means to glorify, to live in communion with all of life, the places you come from, the breath in your lungs, the limits you know all too well. This is what it means to glorify, to keep learning, to never stop changing, to reach for a future as if God were on the horizon, and you can never exhaust the great mystery up ahead.

This is what it means to glorify, to see in the cross a way of liberation, pulling the e brake on all of our violence, insisting that there could be meaning, post traumatic growth, if you will, in your suffering. So we walk the last stretch of Lent together, this deep Lent, all the way to the cross, the tomb, the long dark night of death. Here, we'll witness a God who refuses to force flourishing on us. So patient is this God, so perfect is this human, so present is this spirit that just being alive lifts us, lifts us, lifts us in sacred relationship with the three in one. May you sense the Holy Spirit lift you through all of the relationships around the table of your life that make you you.

May every spiritual effort to glorify God be your reward. Let us pray. Loving God, there is so much in life that feels death dealing. And I realize I don't have to say that to you. You who made it all and gave it over to freedom, to choice, to trust.

As we try to follow the one that you gave us, Jesus, the lover of weirdos, the friend of betrayers, the resistor of violence, will you remind us of what feels life giving, our laughter, our dance with spirit, our friendships? The spirit of the living God present with us now and all week long, enter the places of our hate and our hurt and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.