Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: That you have decided to make some space for us here in the room. Those of you who are joining us online, we appreciate all of you intentionally connecting with us on such a beautiful day, and we hope there's already been some meaningful moments for you as we have worshiped together. For those I haven't met before, my name is Scott. I work in the community as one of our pastors here, and this means that, like most of my colleagues, I do a few different things here in the community, and just part of what I do is up here in front of the lights or on camera. And that's actually one of the interesting things about this job or career.
It's It's actually pretty visible, highly visible at times, but really for such a small part of our lives as pastors. There's way more quiet conversations than laughing crowds, and there's way more intimate moments than tweetable ones. And there's way more work done in planning and preparation and in lonely solitude and in coffee shops and in private chats across tables or beside hospital beds than in the few minutes you see us standing up here on this stage, which is maybe why a series like this one we're in right now is so good. It's good for you, and it's good for us as the people who do some of the teaching because I think there's this temptation for all of us to think that the measure of a community is its liturgy and that the work that the pastor does in that liturgy is the pinnacle of that person's professional skill. And listen, good sermons are better than bad ones.
Right? And beautiful liturgy is better than its alternatives, And I'm not trying to downplay how seriously we take this responsibility and these opportunities we have to share a conversation with all of you. All I'm saying is that I am more than the sum of my YouTube footprint, though my children think it's pretty cool that they can find me on there. And my life is bigger than what you see of me standing up here on this stage. Thank god.
And the same is true for you. You are so much more than your productivity in your public moments or the assumptions that people make from a distance about what you do. Not so much of what makes your life significant is what brings you joy and what makes your face light up, and we don't always see that in each other, which is why I'm super pumped to be able to talk to you a little bit about what makes me happy. That's what we're doing. But before we jump in, let's pray together for a moment.
Creator god, god of all the things we love, of all the ways we find and we discover light in this world, how we make goodness week in and week out, and we cultivate it as we come alive. And we ask in these few moments that we have together now that you would come and you would renew our imagination, Maybe for something that we love that we have left behind long ago. Perhaps for something new that we have a sense that we should explore. Maybe for the promise that our hearts could feel and rejoice again. For a world in need of the happiness that we discover in your humble way, for a world full of violence and fear and pain, we ask, come and let your peace settle in our hearts even now and give us grace to share that peace as we go.
We pray in the name of Jesus, our hope. Amen. Alright. So if you know me well, you know that I try to spend a lot of time outside. And this knowledge is based in part on the fact that I am aware that most people don't find social theory or books or nonfiction or obscure quotes as intriguing as I do.
So I tend to chat when I'm talking with people. I chat about my more active interests. And full disclosure, I actually had seriously considered talking about books today because I have a long standing love for used bookstores and libraries. I know exactly how much credit I have at Fares Fair right now. $37.
And, yes, at times, I've had some addictive tendencies with buying books. My family and our past movers can attest to that. But I thought it might be fun, actually, to talk about our lives as a kind of library and my ongoing effort to slowly trim my library down to a 100 volumes, a collection of ideas and authors that if you were to read those 100 books, you'd kinda get a sense of who and how I am the way I am. And just by way of update, I'm failing miserably at having less than 400 books in my house, so stay tuned for updates. Also, I considered talking about poetry today as my love for poetry has really grown a lot in the last few years.
And spoiler alert, I'm gonna work some poetry in today as a way of sneaking two things that I find that make me happy. But the truth is that I spend a lot of my time in meetings or at my computer or reading and writing by myself or honestly just lifting heavy things that people need help with, and that doesn't ease it doesn't easily translate into the best fodder for sermons or even into what I share on social media, which is why my Instagram account is a bit of an outlier, actually. There's so few nerdy references there, and there's hardly a glimpse of my work as a pastor. And in contrast, it's one of the clearest windows into my love of wild spaces. And at this point, I pretty much given up on pretending that it's little more than an archive of my hiking, which is what makes me happy.
This past year and a half of changes in our world has provided me with some new opportunities to lean into this love that I have. Yes. COVID did ruin my wife and I's attempt to go and do the West Coast Trail together, but this is the first year in my life that I have hiked year round. And who knew that there are a whole group of people that scale mountains in the winter and not to ski? Because, of course, you can die while you're skiing.
I know that. And if skiing makes you happy, I'm sorry. The point is, I prefer to walk because if you have spikes on your shoes, it's fine. And the truth is that I've actually been exploring this discipline, this practice in my life for a long time. Moving back to Alberta about five years ago gave me an opportunity to actually connect with some landscapes and some experiences that I've actually come to see are they're embedded in my body's memory.
As you can see in these photos, you're here in the room with me, that's me and my brother brought to you by the miracles of film and scanner from the early nineteen eighties. You can see that we actually spent a lot of time on trails as kids, actually more time than I remember. It's pretty curious to look at these photos. We explored, we searched, and we caught lots of views together. And more recently, I've rediscovered how formative those experiences were for me.
How the smell of pine sap and sun warmed forest soil, I actually find this kind of therapeutic, which I know is weird. But, also, I found that the movements of wildlife that I catch out of the corner of my eye, these things are reminders of the better and brighter way of watching the world that I learned as a child, how the rhythm of breath and step on a trail at dawn or on a demanding steady climb, these things are a soothing practice and a startling metaphor for finding my way in this life. Also, I have come to see how my spiritual journey, my faith, my theology to some extent, these have been reclaimed by returning to wild natural spaces that I knew when I was younger. And in part, because every time I get up early and I get up high on a hill somewhere, I realize how much I've been shaped by what theologians called general or natural revelation. Through my observations of the world, I seem to have come to know the mystery of god's goodness, which is an idea that we see addressed in the scriptures a lot.
Like, in Psalm 19, for example, where the poet writes, the heavens declare the glory of god. The skies proclaim the work of god's hands. Day after day, these things pour forth speech, and night after night, they reveal knowledge. And here, the ancient songwriter is clearly jamming out in front of a beautiful landscape or in front of a wonderful sunrise or sunset, and they are caught up in the wonder of how light and rock and flower and air, how these things reveal the creative and generous and aesthetic presence of the divine. Look at the world, the poet says.
It shimmers with God's personality. And I would agree. This is increasingly why I go outside, and I go for a long walk. But for the record, I love how the ancient psalmist continues into a paradox in the next few verses. They, speaking of the natural world and its phenomena, they have no speech.
They use no words. No sound is heard from them, and yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. And here, the poet is playing with some meaning. On one hand, the poet's saying, look out at the world. It has a divine message for you, which is more than just a glib statement about how beauty is divine.
Okay? Because the poet is quick to point out that while nature speaks to us, it does so without words, which is to say that we might sense and know the divine with all of our senses. And it says that the language of images might just be the native tongue of all wild spaces, which probably resonates with some of you on a practical level. I mean, I think this notion of divine speech is totally behind the photos I snap of Castle Mountain every single time I pass it. I just can't help myself.
Or why I can't get enough of golden hour light as it strikes the serrated eastern ridge of the Kananaskis Valley every time I'm there. But this is also why we love wildflowers whether they're in an alpine meadow or they're in Fish Creek. It's why we love the warmth and light of an open fire whether it's in the backcountry or it's in the backyard with some friends. See, because if the divine and limitless force behind all the universe speaks a language of images, then you and I belong in wild spaces, and we should be out looking for them wherever they are, which might sound a lot like the sermonized equivalent of just go outside. And I won't apologize if that's what you walk away with today in part because, quite frankly, there are more than theological reasons for the happiness I feel when I go outside and hike for a bit.
In 2015, Stanford University Center for Conservation Biology found that study participants asked to take a ninety minute walk in a grassy space showed reduced neural activity in the specific area of their brains responsible for self focused behaviors and withdrawals associated with many mental illnesses. Another 2012 study found that participants' creative thinking and complex problem solving improved by more than half after being just sent out for a four day wilderness hike. And these kinds of studies, there are many of them. They echo Wendell Berry who, in describing the terrain around his Kentucky farm, said this. He said, as I go out under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing that I actually do, things fall into place.
I enter an order that does not exist outside in human spaces, and I feel my life takes its place among the lives, the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these things and their dead, these things that go and have gone to make the life of the earth. I am less important than I thought, and I rejoice in that, he says, because my mind loses its urgings, it senses its nature, and finds that it is free, which just goes to say that both clinical trials and the testimony of literary minds are part of the growing body of evidence suggesting that exposure to nature has quantifiable restorative property. Some of you already know that in your experience. I'm just making an argument. These places have an capacity to expand our minds and help us find our way, which has actually been my experience.
It's not uncommon for me when I go on my daily walk with our dog to have a clear insight into the thing I'm trying to write or prepare into a problem that I'm trying to solve or I'm facing or as I think about a direction that I think I might need to take. And these instances are not always insignificant. I can still remember the walk I took in the maple filled woodlot near our home in Ontario on a crisp fall day. I've thrown a photo of this park here for you. This became a really wild space for me.
And on this day, I entered the forest canopy. And as I did, I had an intuition. I don't know how else to really talk about it. I had an intuition that my career was gonna start to change, that my affection for my career was beginning to shift, and that the academy where I was working at the time would likely start to play a lessening role in my life in the future. Now, of course, an intuition like that was tested and assisted by my wife and good friends and lots of deliberation over a couple of years before we ended up here at Commons, which is to say on one hand that I believe strongly in how a good long walk or a good long sit, if that's more your style.
That's fine. These things have a potential to help us be creative and aware and insightful as we chart a path through life. But, also, I wanna suggest today that you take this thing that really makes me happy, and I want you to use it as a metaphor because our lives are a bit of a trek. All of our lives are passage, and hiking always helps me see this clearly. How life is a series of climbs and descents, how it's filled with exhilarating views but also with significant and nagging injuries, the fact that we are always reaching destinations and regularly getting lost.
And it's that getting lost bit that I wanna talk about for just a second. See, there's this interesting concept in hiking and wayfinding called bending the map, and it's used to describe what happens when someone gets lost and believes that they are in a different place on the map than they actually are. And in their confusion, the lost hiker sometimes forces the features of the landscape around them to line up with the map even when those connections aren't good at all. And they often get more and more disoriented because they pay attention to the details that confirm what they already think about where they are, and they ignore all the other evidence, which I think is such a powerful example to return to the metaphor of how you and I get off track sometimes, how we stay in relationships or in stale career paths, how we let bad people and poor habits stick around in our lives, how we hold on to old versions of ourselves for no other reason than fear, bending the map of our life's journey and ignoring the evidence that suggests that maybe we might need to recalibrate. And I I love how the author of Psalm 19 offers a bit of commentary that meshes really well with this metaphor.
See, because remember I read to you earlier how the poet begins by saying that all creation speaks a language of images that inspire and inform our knowledge of God. But then the author gets more specific, and the poem changes into a soaring chorus of praise for the law and the traditions of the Jewish God and the Jewish people. The poet writes, the law of the Lord is perfect. It refreshes the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. And in effect, the poet's saying, all creation hints to you of the divine, But the law, the traditions of justice and equity and community, those things are the road map to the divine. And I want you to trust them, the poet says, because they'll refresh your soul. They'll make you wise.
They'll make your heart dance, and they'll make the way clear for you, which is just to say that if our lives are a journey, then the maps we use are super important, and so are the ways we use them. And maybe this metaphor has you thinking about where you are at right now. Maybe you're reflecting on the past year, and it's leaving you feeling like you're adjacent to where you'd like to be. You're not quite there, or even you're not you're adjacent to who you want to be. Maybe you're at a loss for how to move forward in a key decision or in a key relationship, or perhaps you've made a big change.
You've taken a risk. You've left where you were, and now nothing feels familiar. And before anything else, as someone else out on the metaphorical trail with you, I wanna remind you that you're not alone. But I also wanna mirror the psalmist when they assert that there is a way through this life. There's a good way, and you can find it.
Maybe you find it in the traditions and texts and practices of a faith community that supports you. And we really hope we're a community like that. But, also, maybe you find it in the wise words and encouragement of a thoughtful author or an incisive friend or a caring therapist. People who are around you, but they've been in similar places to where you've been, and they have your best in mind. Maybe you'll find it in the intuitions that you sense, in the personal boundaries you make that encourage you to not bend the map anymore, to be honest about who you are and who you're becoming.
Because in all these ways and so many others, the spirit is gently present to us, guiding us towards the places that bring us peace. Now I realize that for some of you, there haven't been nearly enough pictures or hike recommendations or snippets from my AllTrails reviews or tales of crazy bear encounters for you to think that a long walk is worth your time. Some of you don't even think that hiking makes me happy yet. Fair enough. Let me just share one more quick thought with you about how I've come to understand my love for trekking in the outdoors and how this practice helps me engage the divine in my relationship to it.
Because I really do love a 360 degree view, and I love the banter with friends and strangers on a trail that just seems to happen. I love the breathtaking purples of fireweed in alpine meadows that have been burned by fires just a few years ago. I love the breathtaking quiet of the top of a climb. I love how nature is so unselfconscious in its beauty. It doesn't charge us any fees, and it doesn't hold anything back.
And this love that I have, it grows in me the more I get out, and I find my search for it echoed in the words of Mary Oliver and most more recently in a poem of hers. I see. I told you I was gonna sneak a poem in. Mary Oliver says this. She writes, late yesterday afternoon in the heat, all the fragile blue flowers in bloom and the shrubs in the yard next door had tumbled from the shrubs and lay wrinkled and faded on the grass.
But this morning, the shrubs were full of the blue flowers again. There wasn't a single one on the grass. And how, I wondered, did they roll or crawl back to the shrubs and then back up to the branches? That fiercely wanting as we all do, just a little more of life. And maybe you can sense it too, how Oliver names the yearning for a little more of life that comes to you and the thing that makes you happy.
Because I know I do. I feel it in this push I have for more vistas and more transcendent moments and more mountains climb. That's why I do these things. But here's the deal. I really do think that this thing that makes me happy and keeps me active isn't an end in itself, that it might be better seen again as a metaphor.
And here's why. Several years ago, I read a biblical scholar's description of the kinetic energy that's embedded in the stories we have about Jesus because Jesus is constantly moving and walking across a landscape. And, of course, this is why we think the teachings of Jesus are littered with references to the natural world, how he seems to have seen the divine at work in plants and fields and stones around him, not unlike how Psalm 19 says we can. And this kinetic energy is always the driving force, it seems, behind how Jesus interacts with so many different kinds of people, how he crosses so many social and economic boundaries, how he redraws the moral boundaries of the world itself. And this idea of Jesus moving around in the world has changed how I think about the text, and it's also changed how I live, how I follow the way of Jesus, how I follow its intrinsic invitation to move toward others and toward Jesus' imagination of a better world and toward a fuller, richer kind of life.
Because after all, in Matthew six, Jesus tells his audience, and I want you to listen for the kinetic keywords here. Jesus says, don't worry about your life. Look at how the natural world is fruitful, how God cares for it and sustains it. So don't run all over with worry, but seek first. Search for, seek out, go out looking for God's kingdom, and life will come to you.
The NIV says, life will be given to you. And for the record, I do think that so many of the things that make us happy are so good. I've already made the case that hiking will aid your mental health and your creative problem solving and your self awareness. Remember that. But in light of Jesus, these things are not the measure of a truly kinetic and active life.
Now to look at Jesus is to be reminded that our lives are best spent out in the world seeking God's kingdom, looking for it as we advocate, as we choose to be generous, as we challenge harmful forms of power and lend our voices to those who are forced to the margins by it, finding that as we do, life itself comes to meet us, full and abundant life, the kind that truly makes us happy. So may you find God out in this beautiful world as you walk or sit and breathe it in. And I invite you to please post about it so we all can be happy too. May you find and cherish good guides along the way, trusted companions for wherever you are in your journey. And may you live an active life seeking, searching for, and sharing God's fullness in all the places the path takes you.
Let's pray. Loving god present in all the stories that we bring with us to this moment, and now present in the ways we feel invited into a life that's full of the happiness that you bring, a life that's measured and rooted in your goodness that we see around us in the world and we share with those that we meet. And then in some way, I'm aware of the the heaviness that we all bring with us and the ways in which sometimes the idea of happiness and finding the things that bring us to life. Sometimes, maybe we keep that at arm's length. We protect ourselves.
And in this moment, loving god, I ask that you'd give us courage to step toward the kind of life you imagine, the kind of life that's waiting for us as we join you on the path. We ask these things In the name of Christ, our hope. Amen.