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Advent
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
To be the God bearer, to bring God with us into the world means we are present in the middle of celebration. We are also present where it hurts. Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad you're here, and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit thecommons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Welcome. We're really glad that you are all with us today. My name is Joel, and I'm one of the pastors here. And I get to start our advent series this year. I get to stand in front of this beautiful set and welcome us all into this series that leads us to Christmas, and I'm really excited.
Speaker 1:And I have had the flu all week. Yeah. Thank you. And I am a wuss. But it was really, really bad, and I still have a lot of it today.
Speaker 1:But Michael Jordan had one of his most iconic games of his career one night when he had the really bad flu. And the similarities between Michael Jordan and I Crazy. Endless. Right? It's crazy.
Speaker 1:You couldn't even tell. Like, every all parts of my life, I'm like Michael Jordan. Michael had his flu game, and this is my flu sermon. Yes. Today is also our final preview service in Inglewood before we launch there in January.
Speaker 1:So Scott is also opening up the Advent series today. So, yes, we each have a sermon in our respective corners, so to speak. And it was my first week writing a similar but different sermon at the same time as someone else from the team. We'll be doing this a lot more regularly once Inglewood is off and running. But I took this picture of Scott and I working on our sermons on Monday morning.
Speaker 1:I just clearly don't know how to navigate this. It feels like it's maybe a competition. That's my first thing. It's like it's a competition. Who's gonna have a better because we kinda worked on parts of it together.
Speaker 1:Still doesn't even know this picture exists, but guess I'm good. I honestly just thought that Scott was gonna write this whole thing, and I was just gonna change the names of the kids in the stories, and then we would be done. I thought that was fair. But it's a new world, though. Co sermon writing, co sermon speaking.
Speaker 1:This week, in particular, co dad sweater wearing. As I can only assume that Scott is also wearing his pastor dad church uniform this morning in Inglewood. If you listen closely, halfway between Kensington and Inglewood, approximately the foot of the Calgary Tower, That's where the groans from the dad jokes converge and form a black hole of hilarity. This series that we're starting today is called Theotakos. And maybe you have heard that word before, and maybe you haven't.
Speaker 1:In some traditions of the Christian church, Mary is referred to as Theotakos, which is just a Greek term combining Theos or God and a form of the verb, means something like to produce or to bear or to carry. And so Mary is referred to as god bearer. Now the history behind the term is important because, especially in the early centuries of Christian thought, there was a tendency to look at the scriptures and then argue that Jesus couldn't really have been human at all. He just seemed like it. And this matters because Christianity's claims about Jesus and his ability to make us at one with God again, as diverse as those claims are, they all hinge on Jesus being mysteriously God and human, somehow having divine and human nature at the same time.
Speaker 1:And that's hard to wrap your head around in the first place, so some of the early Christians struggled to make sense of that as well. So there was this other idea floating around back then that Jesus may have just been a demigod in the tradition of the Greeks. Divine, yes, but only appearing to have some human qualities or appearing to be susceptible to some human weakness and limitation. And those early Christians, they fought hard not to split the tradition of Jesus' story into God on one side and humanity on the other. Jesus was God, but he was also a stumbling, normal, growing human person.
Speaker 1:You can see how calling Mary the god bearer mattered, how pointing to her role as a human mother to this god man was a key theological idea. And this tradition started as an attempt to say something about Jesus, to affirm that when we look at Jesus, we look at eyes and a face and shoulders and feet like our own. And so watching Mary gives us a window into understanding Jesus. Now as for the structure of this series, Bobby actually put together the idea of this series for us. And we wanted to do this backwards in time look at Mary.
Speaker 1:And Bobby said that at first, it seemed like a good way to get to the Christmas story through Mary's story, and it was just different and fun to go backwards. But doing it this way actually really lends itself to letting us hold all the paradoxes of this particular season. That a season of hope is also a season of darkness and grief. And that really works for us today on this first week of this series because where we start this series is with the story of Mary at the foot of Jesus' cross. Yes.
Speaker 1:Because Bobby wanted this to be fun. Just kidding. But here is John nineteen twenty five to 27. Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Claphos, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, woman, here is your son.
Speaker 1:And to the disciple, here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. Let's pray together. God of eternal love and master of glorious, simple, unexpected gifts for your children, today marks the beginning of our waiting time, our anticipation of a season that honors your decision to save the world through your son. Help us set aside our feverish pace and open our pressured lives to the first sounds of your promises.
Speaker 1:Help us to be quiet enough to hear your voice and eager enough to catch every word of grace, love, and peace. In the name of Jesus, whose coming we wait. Amen. So since I was speaking this first week of Advent, I wondered about the best way for me to set myself up for a good week of prepping, working in the office and trying to write everything down. And I thought I could maybe finally start to listen to Christmas music.
Speaker 1:But in my house, my wife, Hillary, has been listening to Christmas music for, like, eleven months already. So that wouldn't work for me. And so instead, I did this post on Facebook, and I just asked a general question, what was everyone's favorite Christmas movie? And the people, they responded. It was lots of what you'd expect.
Speaker 1:It's a wonderful life, a Christmas story. A lot more people said elf than I was expecting, which is great. That's a good choice. Then there was also a large group of people who responded with the movie Die Hard, and I was expecting that too. But I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 1:I can't help but read a specific tone in the responses from the Die Hard people. Something like, finally, someone asked me about Christmas movies. Now I get to say Die Hard, and I'm gonna say it, and people will know that I think Die Hard is a Christmas movie, even though all they wrote was Die Hard. That's kinda what I hear. Anyway, that's cool because I asked and you answered.
Speaker 1:You fight that good Internet fight. That's fun. I get it because nothing rings in the holidays like yeah. Don't get it. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:But the fun of this poll was that it's preferential. It's all about our preferences. I didn't ask what's the best Christmas movie. I asked what's your favorite. The best Christmas movie is Christmas Vacation, but that limits the answers.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't have made a fun Facebook discussion in the end. It would have been very short. I mean, I did all this because to get in the Christmas spirit, I like to remember all the best quotes from my favorite slash the best Christmas movie. But I also say it to make this point. We all see and we all hear.
Speaker 1:We all like things differently. And regardless of where you are in your understanding or your theology of Mary, during this series, it will be fun to notice some things together. Mary is now a saint in many traditions. But as we begin today and as we begin this series, I find myself much, much more interested in Mary, the first century human being, and what we can learn from looking at her. And since we're doing this backward through time Mary Advent series, I'm not trying to steal anyone's thunder for the rest of the series, but Mary doesn't start out as amazing.
Speaker 1:She doesn't start out as a saint. She's a young woman, not yet married, not powerful in any way, not special that we can see. But what is amazing about this very human Mary is that she is willing, willing to trust God, ultimately willing to carry the divine, And we'll reference the Magnificat later in the month. This is Mary's song after God chooses her to bear his son. There's a line where Mary names the reality of her humble status and that God noticed her.
Speaker 1:She speaks about it further, but we read that poem and that story, and we get to notice that God uses anyone to bring his kingdom about. And this entire story is about faithfulness and risk and God choosing someone who's already vulnerable and overlooked. My wife, Hillary, had an interesting while she was listening to Christmas music for eleven, twelve months straight, had this interesting point this week. As a human, Mary must have still been pretty good, pretty great even. Because despite being fully divine, as we mentioned, Jesus was fully human, as we mentioned, which means he was both a toddler and a teenager, and he turns out good.
Speaker 1:And I don't think that's just because he was God. We really don't have a lot of Mary's story in the first few stories of Jesus' early life when he was a kid. It doesn't mean she wasn't there. But it's not so much Mary in those stories when Jesus stays at the temple when he kinda calls his parents out. That one's more a Joseph story.
Speaker 1:But I am curious personally about the times when human Mary was a great mom and made the right calls. And I'm curious about the times when Mary made some mistakes, had to apologize, and learn from that. As a parent, there are definitely moments with my kids where we want to own the good things that happen, like when they are kind to each other or they share with other kids or they play nice together. And, of course, those moments make it onto social media so everyone can see how good a parents we are. But we also navigate as parents those moments where the opposites happen, where we say either out loud or in our heads, where did he learn that, and why does he think it's okay?
Speaker 1:We own the bad even if we don't want to talk about it. I'm assuming Mary tried to navigate those realities as well. This week, my own mom did two great unselfish mom things. First, she went down to Fratello and grabbed the Commons coffee order because I was sick in my own bed. That's a good mom move.
Speaker 1:Second, she offered an embarrassing story of herself because I asked that she even said I could use in my sermon. So it's just an incredible week for my mom. I said, mom, do you have any stories that are, like, embarrassing for you? I'm talking about Mary who was a mom and you're a mom and she's like, oh, I got one. Okay.
Speaker 1:That's great. And she's even here and so we can talk to her about it afterwards if you'd like to. But I'm told that this only happened once. My mom has this tradition of making Swedish rye bread at Christmas time. And the dough gets made in her bread maker, and they needed to use their dark rye flour.
Speaker 1:But they couldn't find the flour bag from the previous year, but they found a Tupperware full of what looked like rye flour. So they used it, and they measured it out, and they mixed up the dough, and they noticed it was a little bit sparkly. But whatever. They just kept going. So they kept going, they mixed it up, and then they were starting to kind of putting it into loaves.
Speaker 1:And then my sister is the one who solved the mystery. What they found wasn't flour, it was decorative sand. Now my mom thinks the funny part of this story is that they didn't label the decorative sand properly. But I want to stop my mom and say, mom, why do you even have decorative sand? What is decorative sand?
Speaker 1:Mom, who has this? What do you use it for? So at least they didn't bake it or try to eat it. That would have been maybe a different story. I don't know why anyone needs something like decorative sand, but if they didn't have it, we wouldn't have had that story.
Speaker 1:My mom is a very human mom, and she's great. I think that Mary is a very human mom as well. I think Mary nails this whole being honestly human thing. When we do find her at the cross, just like in the rest of her life, she is not supposed to be anything magnificent. She's just faithfully being someone's mom, and that's beautiful.
Speaker 1:I wanna look at these two verses that we're working with today. The first thing that we see when we read this is that there are a lot of Marys in there. And so commentator, Leslie Newbigin, says that the four Marys may correspond to the four soldiers who are referenced in the verses right before, that maybe John is doing that, trying to play that against each other. Other scholars think maybe he's naming two Marys twice by their different names, But basically, after reading all these commentaries, John's list may be understood as two, three, or four Marys. What we know for sure is that one of them was Jesus' mother.
Speaker 1:The synoptic gospels point to the few different pieces in this moment, and John is probably doing a little bit more theologizing here than he is just merely trying to report history. But either way, we have to read it the way he wrote it. Not ignoring the synoptic gospels, but there's a reason this is here and so it's worth our time. Jesus says to each of them, here's your son, and here is your mother. And this is a significant moment that scholars point to as the beginning of a new and very important relationship for the church.
Speaker 1:A lot of commentators point towards this theme that in this moment, Mary becomes the mother of the church. And we do find her present in the book of acts with the disciples at a few significant moments, but this is perhaps the first time that we are shown Mary in her new role as the mother of Jesus' church. And at first, when I read this, I wondered if my very human Mary was thinking, oh, boy, now I gotta look after these jokers. But the reality of what Jesus is doing in this moment, when he binds Mary and John to each other, is that he is very practically and pragmatically looking after his mother. As if Joseph is not in the picture anymore, which we can only assume because of what Jesus does here and the fact that he's not shown up in the gospels for the last half of them, then culturally, Jesus would have been in charge of taking care of his mother.
Speaker 1:And in this moment, he not only creates this new ideal picture of how his followers will live in community, but he just plain makes sure that his mom will not be left to fend for herself in that culture. Newbigin says again that if Mary loses her son, she joins a family that is born of his passion. This new community is born in that hour, and Mary is the mother of that family. One significant thing that we have to notice is that the women and John are allowed to be there at the cross in the first place. Remember, all the other disciples are hiding because they are gonna get arrested themselves.
Speaker 1:Rome wouldn't have seen these women or a very young John as threats to even start or continue any type of revolution. And so again, we see this subtle, gentle, genius of God's hope filled plan. Because sure, in the long run, for this church, you will need a team. You need a Peter, and you will need a Paul. But in this moment, in this quiet moment with some people who are overlooked by the empire, Jesus' words begin this new community marked by love, care, generosity, and a new picture of family and responsibility.
Speaker 1:And it happens because Rome doesn't think Mary is worth chasing out of there. But where this leaves us is where I really wanted to get to today. This paradox of grief and hope in Advent, as Mary holds this paradox for us. First, there's the obvious grief that Mary must be holding in this exact moment, watching her son die a criminal's death. Painful and gruesome to say the least.
Speaker 1:It's pretty easy to say that she's experiencing grief in that. But I am also curious about the grief that Mary has held at other points in her story. As we mentioned quickly before that Joseph's not around and hasn't been mentioned in the gospels since Jesus was a kid. So where is he? Is he gone?
Speaker 1:Is he gone? What did that season of grief look like for our very human Mary? More so, what does that grief what does the grief of Joseph's absence look like for Mary in this moment at the cross? Why couldn't Joseph be here for this? This would be so much easier if he were just here.
Speaker 1:And I wonder if Mary held any hope in that moment. Is she as honest as we are when we experience loss like this? Is she wanting to ask Jesus the same questions that we ask God in these moments? You can't seriously be gone. Is this really over?
Speaker 1:Why are you letting this happen? My friend Jen is a pastor near Chicago, and every December, they do something called the Blue Christmas Service. And it's a service designed to name the pain and the darkness that many experience in this particular season. And it's really connected with her community there. They set aside an evening to be honest about grief, loss, and loneliness.
Speaker 1:Many people go because they are experiencing those things themselves, and they want a safe place to sit in that reality with some others and not feel alone. Other people come to that service to be present and to be a support for those that are grieving or lost or alone. Maybe you are in a season right now with little or no grief, and that's beautiful. Please be grateful for that. The encouragement to you in this season is to be aware of others, making space for those that just are not where you are.
Speaker 1:Know that it is not your job to cheer someone up as much as it is just to be present to them. In our story today, Jesus isn't offering any words of cheer. There's no record of him saying, just keep your chin up, Mary. Things will be okay. We can take an encouragement from Mary in this particular story.
Speaker 1:Presence. And we can take an encouragement from Mary that our grief matters to God. We just said that Jesus doesn't try to cheer Mary up. What I thought about this week is how Jesus offers some very practical help for Mary, having her join in with John so that she won't be left alone. It makes me think that in Advent of 2017, Jesus might, after sitting with us in our grief, offer maybe some more twenty first century versions of practical help.
Speaker 1:Maybe Jesus would say after sitting with us, that sounds extremely difficult. Can I encourage you to talk to a professional about working through some of this? Or you've been dealing with this same grief for some time. Maybe someone can help you with learning some tools to cope with it. We also want to name that Mary doesn't speak in this this moment.
Speaker 1:And this same kind of paradox is present to us in the annunciation that we'll talk about later. She doesn't say anything. All we get is Christ's benevolent care for her. And maybe that's because in some sense, she had seen this coming in some way. Way back near the start of this story, Joseph and Mary take Jesus to the temple to be circumcised.
Speaker 1:And this old man named Simeon, who apparently in the spirit of Advent has been waiting for the Messiah, and he meets them. And when this old guy sees Mary and Joseph, he takes the baby in his arms, and he pronounces that this child will be a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your God's people, Israel. And the gospel of Luke says that this Simeon spoke to Mary, and he said, this child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be spoken against so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed, and a sword will pierce your own soul too. Those of us who have been parents for any length of time know that to really love your child is to experience all of their hurts as well. And maybe Mary had put these words out of her mind.
Speaker 1:Maybe she tried to forget them. But here in this moment, they must have come flooding back. To be the God bearer, to bring God with us into the world means we are present in the middle of celebration. We are also present where it hurts. During Advent, we often read from Isaiah chapter nine, this famous line, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.
Speaker 1:We just have two quick notes about this verse that helps with our paradox of grief and hope. First, the term people suggests that no one should be alone in this. Please do not feel like you have to carry or hold your grief on your own. That is not how Jesus sets up his church. It's not how Jesus sets up community.
Speaker 1:It's not how Jesus sets up co caring for one another. And second, they're walking in darkness. And this one's more of just my own stretch. But maybe there wouldn't be any movement at all. There wouldn't be walking at all if there weren't the slightest shimmer of hope, of light in there somewhere.
Speaker 1:Hope doesn't make grief go away, but hope is pretty subtly powerful in its own way. Maybe you are here and you are desperate for light, Or maybe you need to know that you do not walk in darkness alone. There's a question as you leave today that I hope you will consider in light of this very short two verse story. What are the ways that newness can come to us through our grief? In this moment at the foot of the cross, new community is formed, new relationships are formed to help care for one another, and to help provide hope for the future.
Speaker 1:Jesus does that in this moment of darkness and grief. Newness can come to us through our grief. Barbara Brown Taylor, her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, which I would rather have just given you all who are suffering with grief instead of talking to you for half an hour, that's great. New life starts in the dark, Whether it's a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. So as you prepare for Christmas this year, first, do not accept an invitation from my mom for Swedish rye bread.
Speaker 1:But whether you will be watching Elf with your friends or gathering around and watching Die Hard again with your kids, in the reality of the grief that you carry with you, new and old, may you hear an invitation to be your very human self and carry that very real grief into the presence of the God of the universe, the one who will make all things new. And know that you are met right there, and you are cared for by the divine, both practically and pragmatically, but also with the hope that can come from his presence alone. Let's pray. God of hope, for many of us, this first week of Advent signifies something to be excited about, something to get excited about. We enter this season with hopeful expectation.
Speaker 1:Regardless of how many times we have been through this season before, God, would you help it be new to us? Help it be fresh for us as we wait to celebrate the incredible reality that you became one of us to dwell among us. God, for the many of us, this season can't help but remind us of our grief and the darkness in our lives. And thank you for the reminder, through the very human person of Mary, that we do not walk alone. And thank you for the reminder through the very human person of Mary that all what grieves us is welcome in your presence.
Speaker 1:Amen.