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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
I really think this is one of the most important things to getting Jesus right is realizing that he's not teaching from a script. Jesus is generally, at least, responding in real time to real people from real concerns, not just for theological precision, but from a very real kindness rooted in divine love for the people he's encountering. We are also in a series called grounded, and the idea was to take the first six weeks of this new fall season to reassert for ourselves some of our core foundational ideas. Truthfully, that's something we do pretty regularly at Commons. Maybe not every fall, but at least every couple of years, we come back to and rehearse our story together.
Jeremy Duncan:What we talk about or what we mean when we say things like intellectually honest and spiritually passionate, Jesus at the center. We remind ourselves that we are completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the Bible, but we worship Jesus. And it's in studying those scriptures that we have been led to the realization that Jesus is the only exact representation of the divine and that God has always looked like Jesus even when we didn't see that clearly. And that's because these values, that narrative is a lot more than just good copy for our website. It shapes how we think.
Jeremy Duncan:It grounds the decisions that we make. It informs the risks that we take together in order to continue the work of Jesus in our relationships and our neighborhoods. And so in this series, we have talked about being honest with our doubts and how that can be a source of strength in their faith. We've talked about being passionate in our response to the grace of Jesus offered to us. We have talked about how we have to keep Jesus at the center of how we read and how we understand the intent of scripture.
Jeremy Duncan:But we've also talked about peacemaking as an active work in the world to move toward what is possible rather than just protecting what meager peace we think we have. And then last week, we talked about our participation in community. How we make not just church, but we make the kingdom of God possible, tangible through our choices and our investments. Today, we wanna talk about making all of that personal with the help of spirit. But before we jump into that today, I do wanna take a bit of a sidetrack here on this idea of repetition and rhythm.
Jeremy Duncan:As I've just talked about why we come back to our foundational ideas over and over again and why we ground ourselves in our shared narrative regularly. But we actually have lots of ways we do that here at Commons. It's possible that you are holding a season 12 Commons journal in your hands right now. If not, by the way, you should absolutely grab one before you leave at the blue wall. They are free.
Jeremy Duncan:But every September, that journal comes out. It outlines our entire teaching calendar for the year. And every year, the first, let's say, 40 pages or so outline who we are as community. From our courses to our kids, from baptisms to the creeds, we update, we tweak it every year. We hopefully make it a little bit better each time, but largely, the intent of that project has held steady for twelve years now.
Jeremy Duncan:And this is important, I think, because novelty is a drug. And I mean that somewhat literally. We know that new and surprising stimuli can trigger dopamine release and can activate regions of your brain like hippocampus and your amygdala to spark memory consolidation. That's a good thing, by the way. It just means you remember surprising events.
Jeremy Duncan:It's actually why we work hard to make sure that our sermons are interesting, unexpected, little surprising even. At the same time though, constantly chasing novelty is exhausting. Something can only ever be the best once. Then it's got to be bigger and better and faster. It's got to be more silly or grandiose, more wasteful than ever to spark that same neurochemical response.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, this is why people that study addictions say it's one of the most harmful aspects of particularly online pornography because it wires our brains, particularly for men, to associate sex with novelty and new experiences. And that's in a way that no human long term monogamous relationship could ever begin to compete with. You don't need to just be a fundamentalist to understand that what you expose yourself to shapes you. But that goes for our experience of church as well. Because if we're constantly chasing a newer, better, bigger, more lavish encounter with something we call God, eventually, not even God's self will be able to compete with this false expectation we've created for ourselves.
Jeremy Duncan:What's fascinating, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that the tradition of the church has actually always understood this. Because along with novelty, there's another incredibly powerful human experience that triggers all of those same neurochemical responses, except this time with a little dash of oxytocin, which is what contributes to our sense of connection and belonging. And by the way, yes, I realize right now that all the neuroscientists in the room are cringing because I am vastly oversimplifying very complex processes happening in our brains right now. I understand that. But as an absolute self declared layman, this week I read an incredibly fascinating article in the December 2022 issue of the journal for social cognitive and effective neuroscience.
Jeremy Duncan:And it outlined an applied implication for a neural model of nostalgia. Essentially, it talked about how returning to positive memories can spark the same parts of our brain as novelty, but now with a trajectory toward self reflection, autobiographical memory, and emotional regulation. What that means is that rhythm, repetition, intentional engagement with the seasons of our life, not only is that good for your mental health, not only can that counteract the unhealthy pursuit of novelty, but all of this has also been baked into our Christian tradition, our calendar for millennia now. And so at Commons, every year as we come out of Eastertide into the spring, and we move into ordinary time, and we settle into our summer rhythm here at the church. We slow things down intentionally.
Jeremy Duncan:We breathe out so we can be ready to inhale fresh air and build toward launch every September. Launch, by the way, which is an entirely made up commons holiday. Every September, we celebrate with block parties and journals, but we made that up. That's fine. But then that helps us settle in for the anticipation of Advent, for the celebration of Christmas, for the exhale of ordinary time all over again.
Jeremy Duncan:Then it's the journey of Lent back toward Holy Week. The movement through the season of resurrection, the entry into the rest of summer all over again just to begin a new season all over. And that rhythm, that repetition, that journal that you hold in your hand is an artifact of the journey that you engage with each year. We wanna make it fun, and we wanna make it look nice. We hope our creative pulls you in at least a little bit.
Jeremy Duncan:But ultimately, our real hope is that in a world that feels very often less and less stable than last week. The seasons at Commons modeled on millennia of wisdom embedded in the Christian calendar, that actually starts to feel familiar in the best possible kind of way. I know this. I've been here before. And so as much as a series like Grounded is about our ideas, it's at least as much about our rhythms.
Jeremy Duncan:Returning to seasons we know, rehearsing narratives we remember, regathering in ways that welcome us to begin to return home all over again. And so today, I want to talk about how our return home is actually grounded in an encounter with divine spirit. First, let's pray. God of all of our seasons, you meet us here again in the rhythm of our return. In the turn of the year, in the falling of leaves, in the gathering of your people, in the repetition of songs and scriptures that hold us steady when the world feels uncertain.
Jeremy Duncan:We confess how easy it is to chase what seems new, to look for you in spectacle and surprise. And so today, we pause instead in this familiar place, and we ask that you might help us to recognize spirit here. Woven through the ordinary and the repeated. The meals that we share, the words that we rehearse, the friendships that tether us to grace. Root us once again in the story that grounds us, and center us once more in a love that calls us by name.
Jeremy Duncan:Remind us that return to you is not just to retrace old steps, but it is to find a new life in a path we know by heart. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Today, I want to talk about how our values will ground us in the experience of encounter with spirit.
Jeremy Duncan:And to do that, we're gonna talk about Thomas again. Good news, bad news, divine kindness, and then a pivot toward spirit. And to start, actually I want to ground today's conversation in one that we had just a few weeks ago at the start of this series. Because we started this series called grounded by looking at our values, and right off the top, we talked about how if we're going to be honest intellectually, that will require us to acknowledge perhaps you've been make friends with all of our doubts. As we said in that first week of the series, faith and doubt are really perhaps two sides of the same coin.
Jeremy Duncan:Because honestly, I'm not sure you can even call it faith if you don't have a little doubt. If you had none, then we would call that certainty. And that makes me think of one of the quotes that we used in the quote reel for this series. It was from Voltaire. He had a few good lines, but he once said, doubt is certainly an uncomfortable position.
Jeremy Duncan:But certainty, that's absurd. And that is nowhere more true than faith. Because to believe that we are certain about God sounds, first of all, a little bit dangerous to be honest. And second, that feels like the kind of hubris that would actually render God inaccessible to us. And so to talk about that, I went to the most famous story of doubt I could think about, uncertainty personified in the character of doubting Thomas.
Jeremy Duncan:And as we looked at his life, I think we realized that moniker is selling the dude a little short, but we also looked at a passage in John 14 that I want to return to today. It's that moment where Jesus says, I am the way of God embodied in relationship. I am the life of the divine on display for you to follow. I am the truth of the universe now made tangible in human history. And therefore, no one can find their way back to God without traveling on my path and experiencing my life, without encountering my truth along their way.
Jeremy Duncan:It's one of my favorite passages. As I said, in the opening week of the series, just one of the reasons I will always be indebted to Thomas. But let's go back there, pick up some of the context for that conversation, and then I want to follow a slightly different direction today. So John 14. Jesus is having his last meal with his friends.
Jeremy Duncan:He knows it. So on the night he's gonna be betrayed, leading to his trial and execution, he sees this all coming, so he sits his friends down. And at the start of the chapter, he says this, do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, now believe also in me. And actually a pretty interesting line.
Jeremy Duncan:I don't wanna get too nerdy here, but Greek is an incredibly precise language. And the format of this line is what we call a present imperative. Now I mentioned that because right after this, Jesus is gonna tell his friends, he has to leave them. They're gonna be on their own for a bit. And because of that, sometimes this line gets read as if it's more like a cautionary statement.
Jeremy Duncan:Don't panic. I got some bad news. This week, our family rhythms were a little out of whack. Yours were too. I can imagine.
Jeremy Duncan:I know that's true for us, but in our family, probably like you, when our rhythms get shifted, sometimes that's hard for our kids. Let's be honest, it's hard for all of us. So Tuesday morning, I was dropping off my daughter at day care instead of at kindergarten. And, as we're pulling into the parking lot, she's in the back seat strapped in, and she says to me, daddy, I love you. So, I said, I love you too, baby.
Jeremy Duncan:And then, she said, I mean, I'm gonna cry when you leave. And in that moment, in that parking lot, I knew that I was going to be late for my next appointment. Well, that present imperative in verse one means that Jesus is not like my daughter preparing his disciples for bad news. He's actually responding to the energy that's already there in the room with them. So it's not, don't let your hearts become troubled.
Jeremy Duncan:It's more like, guys, get hold of your troubled hearts for a second. You have this fixed point of trust. You believe in your concept of God. Now leverage that to trust me now. I I think that's really interesting.
Jeremy Duncan:Because I think Jesus is on to something here. I find it's far more easy for me to trust in my conceptual God, the one that lives in the sky and wishes all good things on me, than it is for me to trust my steps in the world, the choices that I make to the oftentimes pretty clear call of that same God to, for example, prioritize my neighbor above myself. Sometimes find I find my faith is pretty solid right up until it asked me to do something. And that's not just an indictment of my dough. I think it's actually a really helpful reminder that faith is not what we think.
Jeremy Duncan:It's how we live. In other words, our faith is what we are actually willing to trust ourselves to in the world. In fact, said another way, good theology doesn't matter nearly that much unless it actually makes us good people. Which is why over the years, I've become increasingly convinced that what I think I believe doesn't really matter that much. It's in watching myself treat other people that I find out what I actually believe, what I find out what I'm willing to trust in the world.
Jeremy Duncan:And so here Jesus is now asking his friends to transfer what they think they believe about God into tangible trust in him and following his way. In retrospect, this moment alone is a pretty unique entry into the corpus of what we call triune thought. This uniquely Christian idea that God is somehow father and son and spirit all at the same time. Creator, redeemer, sustainer in one eternal community. We'll come back to that.
Jeremy Duncan:It's gonna be important today. But first, let's continue because from here Jesus says, look, I am gonna go away. You just need to follow me. And that's where we get that famous line from Thomas. We talked about five weeks ago.
Jeremy Duncan:Actually, we have no idea what you're talking about or where you're going. How can we possibly know the way? And then of course, the rejoinder from Jesus, Thomas. I am the way. Now from here, in the first week of the series, we followed this story along with Thomas' trajectory.
Jeremy Duncan:What I wanna do today is I wanna settle in here in John 14 and see how this moment develops. Because first of all, let's talk about what's happening here for a second. I think our instinct is to read this as yet another example of the disciples not getting it. And, obviously, there's lots of those, so that's a pretty natural read. I do think there's another way to think about this moment though.
Jeremy Duncan:Remember, Jesus has already acknowledged that the moment is tense here. The disciples are anxious. They're stressed. Their hearts are troubled. And now Jesus is adding to that saying, I'm gonna peace out, and you're supposed to figure out where I've gone.
Jeremy Duncan:If we're being honest, already pretty bewildering moment, but at the same time you and me, if we're honest, none of us ever want to hear bad news on top of bad news. I think it's only natural that Thomas would ask, like, why? I mean, he doesn't want to imagine a world without his mentor. Doesn't want to give in to that possibility that he's already stretched thin energy is gonna ask more of him. Honestly, probably, it's just easier to plead ignorance here than anything else.
Jeremy Duncan:And we've already talked about Jesus' famous response. Look, I'm the way. No one comes to the father except through me. What I wanna pay attention to today is actually the next line, verse seven, how Jesus follows up. He says this, if you really know me, you will know my father as well.
Jeremy Duncan:And Thomas, understand this from now on, you know him as you have seen me. Like, apart from the teaching, beyond Jesus' identification of himself with the father, all that, very important, of course. But try to imagine yourself here locked in a moment of anxiety, stressed out, your heart deeply troubled. Your mentor says you're gonna be on your own for a bit. You panic and say, I don't think I can do this without you.
Jeremy Duncan:And you hear this response, Thomas, it's all gonna be okay. You do know me. You do know God. We will find our way through this together. For me, it's almost like there's this level of kindness that gets swallowed up in the magnitude of the theology of this moment.
Jeremy Duncan:Like, don't get me wrong. I love theology. You know that. But sometimes, I think if we really want to understand Jesus, we have to learn to look through the theory to see the person that he's speaking to the way that he does. Like, this isn't just a monologue, a loquacious moment for Jesus to lecture.
Jeremy Duncan:This is actually a conversation. Jesus is not getting through his material. He's responding to people. They're in the room with him. People that he loves who are expressing their fears to him.
Jeremy Duncan:I really think this is one of the most important things to getting Jesus right is realizing that he's not teaching from a script. He's not employed all week like I am to craft a manuscript, to make sure my words are exactly what I want to say. Jesus is generally at least responding in real time to real people from real concerns, not just for theological precision, but from a very real kindness rooted in divine love for the people he's encountering. That means that if Jesus is right and to see him is to see God, well then, I guess the implication here is that God responds to us not just with mathematical precision either, but with that same genuine care rooted in this divine kindness. Which for me makes it all the more meaningful when in the next verse, we find Philip jumping in echoing Thomas's confusion saying, Lord, just show us the father.
Jeremy Duncan:Why are you making this hard? That'll be enough for us. See, here's what caught my attention this week. The moment that leads into one of the central convictions of the Christian faith that we see God clearly, perfectly, only in the person of Jesus. That comes directly in response to a very honest question from Thomas.
Jeremy Duncan:We we just saw that. But now we see that the moment that leads to the also conviction that we can actually depend on the intangible presence of God, the divine spirit in and through our lives to guide us back to God in Christ's absence. Well, that also comes directly in response to another honest interjection from Philip. Like, if I didn't know better, I'd say it's almost as if God is waiting for us to ask the questions, almost as if our ask is as important as being handed our answers. In fact, it's a big part of what makes the Bible so compelling to me because it's not in any reliable sense a message from God dictated to us.
Jeremy Duncan:It is far more decisively a record of our inquiry followed by divine response. And what I take from that pattern is that faith does not make it our job to repeat what we've been told. Faith makes it our job to learn to ask better questions of God. Like honestly, that's a pretty good definition for discipleship. I ask better questions today than I did last week.
Jeremy Duncan:Well done, good and faithful servant. For real. That's the only thing you take today? That's probably more important than any high minded intellectually sounding biblical analysis I could offer. Faith is about asking good questions, which then means we have to learn to hold our answers with open hands, which gets really important here as Jesus continues.
Jeremy Duncan:Because he starts by addressing Philip's comment. He pivots pretty quickly though into some pretty remarkable stuff. Who? You wanna see the father? Look at me.
Jeremy Duncan:But don't you know me, Philip? Even after I've been among you such a long time, anyone who's seen me has seen the father. How can you ask for this? God is with you here right now in front of you. But not content then to only identify himself with God, Jesus now continues.
Jeremy Duncan:This is verse 15. I'm gonna read the whole section here. If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. The spirit of truth.
Jeremy Duncan:The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Before long, the world won't see me, but you will because I live and you also will live. And then you'll realize that I am in my father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
Jeremy Duncan:Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. And the one who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love them and show myself to them. Like, this is a legitimately wild response to the disciples confusion right now. Guys, I'm going away, but I and the father are one in the same. So the father, which is I, will send another, and the spirit will live in you because I will come to you and I will teach you, and you will love so well that you will see me all the time in your life.
Jeremy Duncan:We call this trinity. It's not an explicitly biblical concept, at least not fully articulated until hundreds of years after the New Testament as people wrestled with passages like this. I mean, what does it mean that to see Jesus is to see God? What does it mean that Jesus can be gone but also live in us? What does it mean that love is not a characteristic, but the defining attribute of the divine?
Jeremy Duncan:And so slowly, we wrestled with these questions and we settled on this paradox of believing that God was, God is, God always somehow has been three persons in one divine essence called God. And ever since, there's been myriad texts and explanations, heresies, failures to explain this paradox and make it more sensible. As as we talked about, I think we often want God to make sense mathematically. And not only is that unachievable, I think it actually misses the intent of what Jesus is saying here. The point of why we, as the church, articulated a concept like trinity to begin with.
Jeremy Duncan:Because at best our theology shouldn't try to explain away the divine. It should point us to the only thing that we know for certain about the divine, that God is love. And what that means is that God must have always been love, been able to show love, been able to receive love before there was anything else to be loved. And that must mean that God is somehow loving community. God is an endless dance of gift and reception.
Jeremy Duncan:Give and take. Inhale and exhale. What we call God is love alive from before there was anything else, even a universe. Which is why Jesus can then say, guys, keep all your doctrine if it's helpful to you. But at the end of the day, the one who loves, they will be loved.
Jeremy Duncan:And I will search them out, and I promise they will see me through their lives. Sometimes, I think we make Christianity a lot harder than it needs to be. To be honest, sometimes here at Commons, I we contribute to that. I think we wanna be thoughtful, and we wanna be intellectual. We want to study diligently and think rigorously, and all that is good.
Jeremy Duncan:I actually think it's very important. Bad theology has terrible consequences. But still, there comes a time when all of our theory about God gives way to trusting ourselves to the spirit of God. That voice of love that calls us to step beyond what makes sense and extend our lives into what is loving for those near us. That's when we go beyond peacekeeping, and we participate in peacemaking.
Jeremy Duncan:That's when we go beyond consuming, and we start creating and participating. That's when we go beyond a minimum viable product we can justifiably call faith. And we actually start to invite spirit to teach us to listen for love when it speaks and then to follow in its footsteps. To be thoughtful, but also courageous. And to be zealous, but also kind.
Jeremy Duncan:To center Jesus not just in our interpretation, but in our interactions with each other. To hear that still small voice through which God becomes more than just an idea, but a partner who's speaking and guiding welcoming us home each day on that path of love, helping us to understand what it looks like in our interactions right now with each other. This spirit of God is more than just a set of rules that we follow and expectations we live up to, patterns that we exist within. It is that ongoing call to listen to each other, to spirit, to observe the world around us, and then to choose the path that is most loving in any given moment. And so we ask spirit of the triune God be with us even today, slowly helping us become people who know love when we see it, and then muster the courage to follow it wherever it takes us.
Jeremy Duncan:Let's pray. God, thank you for all of our theory and our theology, our intellect, and the mind that we put into making sense of something as incomprehensible as you. But God we pray that that would never overshadow this voice of love that is tangibly awake in our lives. Calling us towards the most loving reaction in any given moment. That is changing us and shaping us into more caring, more kind, more generous people than we ever imagined we could become.
Jeremy Duncan:Might we think well, but more than that might we trust well. And in that might we slowly begin to discern your steps in the world and the way that you invite us all the way back to you. May spirit be near us and in us, animating us with grace and peace today. And might that slowly contribute to a world that looks more and more like you. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Jeremy Duncan: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 commonschurch.
Jeremy Duncan: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.churchdiscord 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.
Jeremy Duncan:Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.