[Music]
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 commons dot church for
more information
today we are logging back into this
conversation that we are having about
the holy spirit
which if we're honest is really just an
exploration of what we mean
of what we say when we're talking about
god
as jeremy referenced in week one a
christian imagination sees god as
trinity as a divine community as an
endless dance of gift
and reception father son spirit source
savior and storyteller and christians
have formed these images because of what
we see in scripture of who god is and
how god acts and what god says showing
us that imagination just might be the
most significant spiritual practice that
we have at our disposal i mean think
about it this way the scriptures present
the divine through a series of striking
literary forms but those are forms that
the church continues to journey with and
grapple with
and create with as we compose new and
brilliant words and songs and art and
justice to make the world better
which
is just another way of acknowledging
that the title of this series forgotten
god it's a reminder to not neglect
our imagination of god
to not push the idea of a creative and
sustaining force behind all things into
the background of our lives
to never stop picturing god or
conceiving god
because the holy spirit is a kind of
muse for the art of living that we
compose each and every day i think
and
i have loved the practical ways that
this series has stretched my thinking so
far in
part because i found it really helpful
to think of faith less as a noun
less like a briefcase that i carry
because i mean let's be honest nobody
carries briefcases anymore right the
point is is that i like imagining faith
as something that i do
like
exercise
like art like
intimacy
all of these practices that require and
develop transformation in me
as i do them and i have loved thinking
about the holy spirit how this idea has
these practical implications for
this work and i'm still
bawling over this idea from last week
that to find and to listen to the most
gentle voice i can hear
there under all of the noise and all of
the chaos and all of the criticism
to hear that gentle voice is to hear the
same spirit that stirred over and
through and out of the cosmos before all
things
to hear that voice is to hear the sound
of easter morning which coincidentally
is the same sound we all make when we
wake up
as we take a breath in
and we breathe it out
to hear that voice is to encounter the
divine in all of its wondrous mystery
and today we are going to take another
tentative step down this road of
encounter together and as we do i'm
gonna invite you for just a moment here
to send ourselves
let's pray together now
god of all
all creation that flourishes
and of the universe that continues to
expand away from us
all of our human experience and our
memory and our hoped four days
all of our energy and our breath and
each heartbeat ringing now
we pause
and we choose to maybe shift our
attention from
all that aches
and all the distracts and from all the
things that we bring with us we carry
today
and we turn in whatever way we can
toward you
asking that you would help us in the
mystery of grace to be holy here
and to be truly with each other
to turn our eyes with kindness to your
presence that we can see in those around
us and
maybe we can feel in our fragile hearts
and bodies too
we pray that you give us strength to
receive
the grace of
shared welcome and warmth
your spirit leading us now even as we
take up ancient words trusting that ever
and always you make them new
we pray this in the name of christ
our hope
amen
okay so today
we're going to dive into a little bit
this idea of spirit and community and to
do that we need to talk through
imminence and real time and what seems
good
because in part what we're going to do
is wade through a well-established
theological relationship between the
ideas we have about the holy spirit and
our ideas of the church
see the christian scriptures offer a
clear picture of how jesus's earliest
friends and followers drew a direct
connection between the idea of god as
spirit and their identity as a community
pulled together and animated by the
spirit
and when we look at the book of acts
which we're going to spend some time in
together today
we see the earliest christians forming
communities around the message of jesus
and this is a message that they told
again and again in personal accounts of
transformation
examples like peter and paul and
uh stephen that's the other one that i
was thinking of
point is this
is that i don't think it's right for us
to talk about spirit without telling
stories
and seeing as i'm in the spot today i
guess it's my turn right
see because like jeremy my earliest
faith was shaped by a tradition of
christian practice and spirituality that
hadn't forgotten god as spirit in fact
spirit was their main selling point my
earliest imagination of god was shaped
by pentecostal christians and
communities that talked about the book
of acts as though it was still
happening
and i experienced this dynamism in the
socioeconomic and cultural diversity of
the churches that i was taken to
i experienced it in the authentic
emotive liturgy that was for the most
part more genuine than coercive
where sorrow and joy alike were led out
into the world as part of communal life
sometimes people would cry openly
sometimes they would shout in
celebration
and all the time the spirit was
regularly referred to as the source of
what was shared
and this left many including me feeling
like i belonged to something that seemed
spontaneously alive and growing and
accessible to everybody
and you know what to this day i'm still
okay with most of that
because i've come to see how it formed a
strong sense in me of what theologians
refer to as divine imminence
this sense
that while god is transcendent beyond us
as creator and other and source of all
god is also around
and mysteriously present
and maybe
maybe god is good
jump ahead to my early 20s where as an
undergrad student
carrying all my angst and my questions
alongside of these religious memories
and i found myself standing in a small
monastery chapel on a greek island
listening to two orthodox monks seeing
the vespers service in a language
that i couldn't understand
and late afternoon light is waning and
incense is billowing and filling the air
and i could feel that same
imminent presence
from my childhood
in the priest's
cadence and their melody aware that
somehow i belonged there even though i
clearly didn't
feeling something unfamiliar and yet
somehow commonly held in the shaping of
sacred space and time
and that's just a snapshot of how i've
sensed the spirit in these kind of
imminent moments
and christian tradition teaches us all
that regardless of how connected we feel
to this tradition
it's so important to look for and name
our own moments like this because
individual experiences have always been
vital to the story of faith perhaps
and even most especially if you have had
different experiences than me
because some of us sense the spirit in
quiet reverence
some of us in emotive and an expressive
liturgy
some of us find it in the plural
pronouns of the creeds that invite us to
say even when we don't know we can
we
believe
and i'm not so sure that these kinds of
experiences are exclusive to our
religious community encounters because i
think that probably here today there are
some of us who have sensed spirit in the
shared work of a justice cause
or a local community council that might
be dysfunctional but it gets the job
done
or in a neighborhood gardening project
some of us in the playful laughter of
our closest friends
are in their holding of our deepest
sorrow
because i really do think that divine
eminence
is refound in and through
those around us
the spirit at work and all the moments
and places and places that we choose
each other
now
people have noted this communal aspect
of human experience
renowned social theorist emil durkheim
is just one of them he coins this term
collective effervescence to describe the
kind of enchanting encounters that he
observed in rural tribal groups that he
studied and that term has actually been
applied to all kinds of other groups
in a recent new york times article
psychologist adam grant suggested that
these kinds of effervescent experiences
where we feel like we're syncing with a
group of people
just think like live performances or
sporting events or celebratory
gatherings like convocations and
weddings
but this is what we've been missing out
on these past two years with social
distance restrictions in play because
that sense of being connected with
others isn't something that you can get
by binging episodes that are trending
now
or watching a video that has 34 million
views or even talking about bruno which
anybody else in the room watched in
kanto six times in the last week anyways
here we go grant suggests
that we are at a loss
because of the way that groups can
impact our emotions sometimes for the
better
exemplified in such facts as you being
five times more likely to laugh with
other people than by yourself
and that might all be true
but it's not really what i'm getting at
because i'm not suggesting that every
group we're part of makes room for
spirit
or helps us to be aware of the spirit's
nearness i'm more intrigued today by how
the christian theology of spirit might
help us in the work of community
i'm curious how practical this theology
can be and to find some hints i want to
look quickly at a couple stories from
the book of acts because that whole book
focuses on how the spirit sparked and
sustained the early christian
communities
okay so the first story is in acts 10.
and here we see the apostle peter who is
one of jesus's most faithful followers
we see him on the mediterranean coast
he's chilling for a few days i guess and
he has this dreamlike vision while he's
napping on the roof one day
where he sees a sheet descend from
heaven
and it's holding a bunch of animals that
were considered impure and unfit to eat
by jewish dietary standards
and in this trance he's having he hears
a divine voice tell him to get up and to
eat one of these animals which
he adamantly refuses because he is an
observant jew
but this voice speaks to him again do
not call anything impure
that god has made clean
and the vision ends
and then we jump into the story ahead to
the next day we find peter in the house
of a gentile somebody who isn't jewish a
roman centurion named cornelius and he's
there with his family and his servants
and we learn that cornelius is aware of
the jewish god that he's devout and
faithful in his religious observance and
i love it because as peter and cornelius
start talking peter is clearly still
working through
this weird vision that he had the day
before
because he tells the group he says look
you guys are probably aware that jewish
law doesn't really allow me to be here
and visit with you which is super
awkward right telling your friends that
you're not supposed to be there but then
he says this he says but god has shown
me that i shouldn't call anyone impure
or unclean
and then a little later
after learning some more of cornelius's
story he continues he says this i now
realize how true it is that god does not
show favoritism
but accepts from every nation the one
who fears god and does what is right
there's a couple interesting things here
first the greek noun that describes god
as not picking favorites
prosopolemtes besides being a great
tongue twister it's built on the noun
prosopa which refers to the masks
that actors wore in ancient greco-roman
theater performances
and by using this word peter's making
this profound observation for him
and for us
that the divine doesn't play favorites
with the masks of socioeconomic status
or hierarchy or power that we don during
our day to day
god doesn't play favorites with the
masks of culture or gender or purity
that are imposed on our bodies
and others as well
the second thing to note here too though
is that peter seems to be coming to
these conclusions
in the moment
these shifts of perspective happening
with a kind of surreal slow motion pan
across the room because yeah he had had
a vision
but now he's standing in the room
with real gentiles
and he's trading stories of god's
goodness with those that he had always
been taught to avoid those he assumed
were outsiders
and the text tells us that while he's
still talking to them the spirit comes
upon everybody in the house
jews and gentiles alike swept up in this
ecstatic communal experience of grace
that's so profound that peter
immediately baptizes cornelius and the
entire house
and the tremors of this boundary lifting
event
shot out
into the early christian community and
we're going to talk more about that in a
second
because before we move on i want to say
that i think there's something here for
every single one of us who's ever
changed our minds when we realized that
an idea or a system was impacting some
other people
those of us who have ever moved like
peter from one position to another
sometimes
at greater cost than we thought we would
have to pay
some of us who have found our
perspective shifting as we learn and we
really start to see the raw humanity of
another person or another group
and that's this realization that the
voice
inviting you
to open your heart in forgiveness or in
acceptance
that little intuition you sometimes have
that keeps you curious about another
person's experience underneath their
mask that they try to keep on
that quiet whisper that nudges you
for your own good or someone else's
it nudges you from opinions or from
boundaries that used to feel so
non-negotiable
that voice
is always the spirit
teaching you to trust in real time
embodied experiences that are moving you
towards god's best
now
to be clear these boundary bending
events in acts 10 and in our lives they
those ones are next hands they were
really hard for early christian
communities because many of them were
trying to form across this ethnic divide
of gentiles and jews across the
separations of social rank and status
and as we move in the story ahead five
chapters in acts 15 we get this curious
look
at how they did this work
at this point in the story some time has
passed since peter has been in cornelius
house
and in the intervening period the
apostle paul has come on to the scene
paul who was a defender and a teacher of
the jewish law
he had become a follower of jesus
through a series of startling events but
because he had been pretty mean to early
christians he kind of had to go quiet go
off grid for a while only to emerge more
than a decade later
with a bunch of ideas about jesus
and the desire to tell the gentile world
about them
which is what him and his associates
start to do and eventually they go to
jerusalem to share what's been happening
in the christian communities across the
mediterranean and unsurprisingly
there's some diversity in the community
and not everybody agrees with his method
and his message
in fact some of the early christians who
were also pharisees really buckled down
on this idea that male gentile converts
had to be circumcised like all observant
jews they had to obey jewish law in all
of its entirety in order to join
christian churches
so
the apostles and the elders they have
this meeting
they hear from and they listen to many
individuals
they have an extended discussion the
text says which i think just means it
went far too long
and james says this james is jesus's
brother he's the leader of the jerusalem
church he stands up at the end of this
gathering and he says
it is my judgment therefore
that we should not make it difficult
for gentiles who are turning to god
let's write a letter he goes on that can
be distributed to all kinds of places
and so that's what they do they write to
the gentile believers in antioch syria
and silesia
it seemed good to the holy spirit and to
us not to burden you with anything
beyond the following requirements
you are to abstain from food sacrifice
to idols from blood from the meat of
strangled animals
and from sexual immorality you will do
well to avoid these things
farewell it's very it's very formal
unless i sort of chuckle because this
seems like such a random list right
these instructions just sort of cobbled
together but here's the deal you may not
be able to see this but these
instructions are basic in that they
encourage gentile believers to stay away
from the rituals of civic in imperial
temples
practices that often reinforced strict
social role descriptions
and exploitative power dynamics
which were things that didn't align with
how jesus's followers were attempting to
build community across the divides of
ethnicity and across the divides of
gender and across the divides of status
which is great but i want to focus in on
that interesting line it seemed good
to the holy spirit and to us because
that seems a little haphazard right
like these are major decisions that
shape the christian story and it sounds
like ax is saying that the church
expanded because of a boardroom decision
where a bunch of guys just sort of
rolled the dice and went with their gut
except i don't know if that's how we
should read it
what's
curious is that the greek verb
which is translated here as it seemed
good
it has all these other adjacent meanings
things like to think or to suppose or my
favorite
to imagine
and taken that way it's easy for me to
see what the author of acts was going
for here
it's easier for me to get my head around
their theology of the holy spirit
because this is actually a lovely
practical theology
for how the spirit shapes
good community
spirit shapes it through people
committed to working through
complex issues
people committed to hearing one
another's perspective people building a
healthy sense of consensus
people who are committed to not making
things difficult
for each other
and you know what
the thing i love most
that it's so easy to forget that this
decision and this language that they
come up with it came after years
years of cultivating distance or
difference
it came after years of listening to each
other it came after years of coming to
the same table years of allowing
christians of different stripes to tell
their stories
shaping a theology that believed the
spirit was the spark of social change
that jesus had dreamed of but then also
a theology that trusted the spirit as
the source
of the holy patience they needed for
themselves
and for others
because real change is hard
and it seems so
long in coming
and in that light
their open and creative language of it
seemed to us isn't casual at all
it's not arrived at without grit and
tenacity
instead we can see it as the product of
a group that had let go of faith as a
thing to be owned and possessed and
wielded a community that had accepted
truth as something to be found
over and over again
together
spirit as their
guide spirit
as our
guide to
as you
make us better
by humbly sharing your story
and pursuing your wisdom and naming what
you see
as you listen with
radical bravery and generosity at times
joining together in our desire here at
commons to become a community that
offers more diverse voices in more
diverse places
and as we welcome
and we embrace each other here and in a
bunch of spaces in this community making
connection
less difficult for those left out
labeled different
or overlooked
imagining
with all of the creativity we can muster
a way toward life
that seems good
let us pray
loving god
perhaps in this moment we're
so to find ourselves with images that
come to mind of the life that we lead
the ways in which you
have stepped close to us in the presence
of meaningful connection
your great imminent presence in the
world an adjoining
sort of knock on the door of our life
day after day in good friendships and
meaningful connections and intimacy
and today we want to name that we also
want to name our for some of us the
great longing we have for that
we ask that you give us courage to live
in the world as we seek it
we thank you too for the gift of
community that helps us to see
and rediscover your presence
day after day week after week and we ask
that you would give us courage to trust
the way that you always change our lives
in real time
with people who are different
with people who ask and call us towards
difference
where ideas and convictions that can
seem so hard
and we hold them so tightly
with those things fade and loosen in the
light of grace that invites us into
newness and to flourishing
and we pray too would you guide us
as we commit ourselves to doing what we
feel is best
with your tender presence guiding us
in the name of christ
we pray
amen
you