Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Summer Series Week Three
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Something happens to us when we build our lives on the idea that God chooses all.
Speaker 2: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.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Hey, everyone. Scott here. Welcome to church today. It's so nice to be able to share this space with you, and we really do hope that you're enjoying all that summer has to offer. It can feel like it's only nice for about a minute here in Calgary and we can miss it if we sleep too late or we stay in too much, which is just to say we hope that you're finding spaces and times to rest and recharge.
Speaker 1:And, of course, I also hope you've enjoyed the first couple of weeks in this summer series, Speaking Sunday. Bobby and Yelena certainly stirred my mind and heart with their engaging and profoundly pastoral work with a couple of big words that get tossed around religious circles. I mean, salvation and doubt. Those are both pretty big road markers on our journeys of faith. And a thoughtful and faithful engagement with them is so important, which is why I'm so thankful for my colleagues and friends that lead us so faithfully.
Speaker 1:We really do have the most amazing people here at Commons, right? If you are joining us today for the first time in this series, first of all, welcome. What we are doing this summer is looking at some words we use in and around our Christian tradition. And some of these we use all the time and we don't necessarily think about what they mean, but others we might not use that often, but perhaps we'll realize just how vital they are to our experience. Regardless, some of what we're after is how when it comes to a life of faith, when it comes to being a follower of Jesus' life and teaching, you have to use more than just one word to guide you.
Speaker 1:You can't just take a term and build your entire life, theology, and practice on what you think it means because words grow and change. And they've been doing that for a long time. And in connection to this, author Marilyn McIntyre suggests that what happens when we contemplate a word for a week and we turn it over and over in our mind is that we take up a kind of deliberate sacred reading of the world where a simple collection of vowels and consonants can become both key and doorway into a new kind of seeing, which just means that if this series gives you a little momentum for some summer contemplation, great. But really, at the very least, we hope you sense the invitation to grapple with how and why we use the words we do, which we're here to do again. But before we jump into this installment of How We Speak Sunday, let's pray together.
Speaker 1:Loving God, present to us now in the gift of community that we experience in all of these different places that we watch together from. And we're grateful for this season of warmth and of rest, and maybe of the grace that comes to us in it. And we pray that you would watch over us and lead us as we as a community work through these terms and these words, these places in our lives where maybe a word has come to mean more than it should, and maybe we need to let go. But then also where maybe we need to take up something new, find new meaning and light for our stories. We trust your goodness even as we do this today and we pray in the name of Christ.
Speaker 1:Amen. Okay. So today we are circling around the word chosen. And as we do, we're gonna take a few moments to do some unpacking, examining some ideas that sometimes travel with this word and maybe they shouldn't. Before we talk about divine decisions before we go, and our text is taken from the Gospel of John, chapter 15, a passage that some of you may remember us covering during Lent a couple years ago where we looked at how John recalls these sayings that Jesus gave to his friends just before he was arrested and executed.
Speaker 1:That series is called One Last Thing if you wanna check it out. Anyway, that's the context. Jesus is saying the things that he knows he needs to before he's gone. These are the most important details, his final thoughts. And I want to read a few verses here where we jump into Jesus saying, my command is this, love each other as I've loved you.
Speaker 1:Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command, and I no longer call you servants because a servant doesn't know his master's business. Instead, I've called you friends for everything I've learned from my father I have made known to you. And then he says, you did not choose me, but I chose you and I appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. And then he repeats his command, love each other.
Speaker 1:And on the surface, this language of Jesus choosing his closest trainees seems pretty innocent and straightforward. There's some beautiful imagery here actually of friendship as a form of choosing in the world, which we might recognize because we know the joy of finding those who share our quirks, those who offer us companionship that we slowly realize we can't live without. And as one scholar notes, there's this compelling imagery here of spiritual life as friendship, where Jesus in effect describes himself as a good friend, thoughtful, intentional, where he discloses the secrets of his own heart to his disciples and to us as we follow in their steps, which mirrors the ways our own human friendships are most meaningful when we mutually choose each other and share the work of vulnerability. And as we choose to disclose our inner lives to those who guard these things with tenderness. And to be honest, some of us are likely familiar with some of the phrases here in John 15 that I've just read, but at the same time, this probably isn't a passage that looms large.
Speaker 1:In your imagination when you think of the word chosen, which is why we're gonna come back to this before we're done. Chances are that if you spent any time in and around the Christian tradition, you've run into this idea of chosenness, however. I mean, the scriptures are full of this language and imagery going all the way back to the beginning in Genesis 12 where God chooses Abraham to be a father of the Jewish story. A story through which God intended to bless all the peoples of the earth. There's this language of chosen nations and chosen people.
Speaker 1:And really, this is just part of how our tradition has explained how redemption is brought to the world. It happens because God chooses. God chooses us. And in the Christian story, this big idea is often built on passages like we find in Ephesians one where the apostle Paul writes and tells his friends that God chose us before the creation of the world. How in love, God predestined us for adoption into a new family through the work of Jesus.
Speaker 1:And listen, that word predestined is a top tier gold standard theological term in its own right. That's speaking Sunday three point o at least. And here we are in summer mode and I've got even less time to work with these big terms, but it's okay. Relax. Because we don't have to go into all the ins and outs of what Paul meant.
Speaker 1:All you need to know for now is that Paul's teaching about God's choices evolved in the history of the church. And the words he used in a letter to his friends took on additional meaning over time to the point where within a few centuries of Paul's life, Christian thinkers were arguing that Paul was describing a universe in which God chooses those who will be saved. And then, dark plot twist here, how God also chooses those who will not be saved. And that might be one of the ways some of us have heard this word chosen used before, where God is an arbitrary cosmic judge, content to hand out judgment coldly and, let's be honest, a little cruelly, which I must say is a kind of theological violence that we should be disturbed by. At least in part, quick callback here to the Inspired series we just finished.
Speaker 1:We should be disturbed because these images contrast so obviously with the life and the teaching of Jesus, who says these words we've just read in John 15, but also, quick reminder, taught in Matthew's gospel that the kingdom of God is like a dredge net that gets pulled along the bottom of the sea. And a dredge net doesn't just pick up and choose what it wants to collect. It doesn't sift through and target the best and most valuable things to hold on to. No, it catches everything, I. E.
Speaker 1:Everyone in its grasp. Which is not to say that Jesus taught that all end up in the kingdom. He clearly spoke about how we can choose not to enter it, but I suppose that's the point. That in Jesus, God's prerogative is not to hand out eternal room assignments with an air of disregard, but rather how Jesus speaks of how God's choice is to catch all up in grace. Giving us reason to let go of the idea of God as a totalitarian despot and find new ways to think about what God really chooses.
Speaker 1:Because something happens to us when we build our lives on the idea that God chooses all. It starts to shape our politics. It starts to work its way into the ways that we treat our neighbors and it recalibrates how we react to those who don't like us. And also, maybe we start to let go of the fear that's informed our journeys in the past and slowly begin to believe that God is ever and always on our side. The reality is that this unpacking shows us how important it is that we come back to John 15 to anchor our discussion of the word chosen.
Speaker 1:Because Jesus' conversation with his friends makes it clear. Look, you didn't choose me. I chose you. And what happens when we sit with that for a minute is that, yes, Jesus undermines any kind of theological system or way of looking at the world that might lead us to disqualify others. But that's not all it does if we're honest.
Speaker 1:See, I spend a lot of time chatting with people in and around and outside our community. And while I do run into the odd person that thinks they are amazing, that they've somehow aced all the tests of life and they deserve all the best things, just think Brent from the show The Good Place if that helps. Okay. I I don't think I've ever actually met anybody like Brent, but I don't actually need an imaginary person for this part of the sermon to work because my point is that most, if not all of us, have the opposite problem. Most of the people I chat with aren't walking around with some kind of superiority complex, somehow overly confident in their chosenness.
Speaker 1:Now, if anything, most of us self disqualify where for a whole host of reasons, bad decisions and poor habits, big mistakes, small hang ups, things we control, things we can't. We have a tendency to question just how much power divine choice actually wields. And maybe we ask ourselves if we should trust God's judgment because we know who we really are. And friends, if you thought the toxic theology of God condemning people to internal damnation was rampant in the world, take a moment and take stock of your own thoughts and imagination. And ask yourself how much of your striving and how many of your attempts to do right and to be right and to appear right, right.
Speaker 1:How these things are rooted in a deep seated suspicion that love might not have saved a place for you at the table. Which is what this story in John 15 is all about. See, because Jesus says in verse nine, as the father has loved me, so I've loved you. And these are words that confront our fierce tendency to resist God's affection, not because that affection isn't good, but because we don't think we're worth it. And these are words that say, in effect, that the mode of God's choosing is Jesus.
Speaker 1:And that love is the evidence of that choosing. And that human connection in all of our feeble attempts to love each other, that mutuality is love's way of getting out into our homes and communities. Where Jesus' love for his disciples and the sick and the foreigner and even his enemies, That this kind of love still comes and invites us all to move from being slaves and servants to a life too small and a life of internal suspicion and a life of spiritual anxiety. And it coaxes us from there into a group of friends, caught up together and singing of love roaming free in the world. Which brings us back to why these verses should shape what we think it means for us to be chosen.
Speaker 1:Because it's right here that Jesus turns our understanding of this word when he says, I've chosen you to go and bear fruit that will last. Where all the stories of God at work in nations and people in the Hebrew Bible and all the mystery of God come to be with us in the incarnation. How these things come to a culmination here where Jesus seems to be saying, I've come and I've shown you what love looks like. I've come and I've chosen you. You don't need to be afraid anymore.
Speaker 1:And you don't need to worry about whether you're doing it all right. Just love each other. Because when you do this, you embody the glorious unfolding of God's choice. A choice that leads you as you go out and you move and you live and you bear fruit that lasts. Which, put another way, is to say that God's choosing sets us free to choose freely ourselves, to choose creatively ourselves, and to choose fearlessly ourselves.
Speaker 1:Where, when made with love, each decision you make can be divine. Your choice to serve someone thanklessly, your choice to lead with integrity, Your choice to start a new venture. Your choice to be a friend, partner, and companion. Your choice to create art and beauty. Your choice to study and to learn and to be curious and to work and to forgive and struggle and grow.
Speaker 1:All choices filled with divine delight. Where you and I come to a place where we trust that we are chosen to the degree that, as Saint Augustine wrote, love and do what you will. Whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace. Whether thou cry out, through love cry out. Whether thou correct, through love correct.
Speaker 1:Whether thou spare through love, do thou spare and let the root of love be within. Of this root can nothing spring but what is good. A goodness made to share and build and sustain the world. Our daily decisions to love the clearest sign that God chooses all. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, we are present again to your work in the world that we see most clearly in Jesus, who in his words and deeds, his teaching, his life, and in his resurrection came to show us that we have nothing to fear about what you choose in this world. That in fact, that as far back as this story goes, you have ever and always been choosing all and making the way clear for all to find their way to you. And we're grateful for the ways that this wisdom comes to us. And we're grateful for the things that we can maybe take out of our theological handbags that maybe have been weighing us down. And we let go of those images where you are violent in the way that you judge and you choose.
Speaker 1:And instead, we adopt the language of Jesus who calls us friend, who chooses us again and again and invites us into the work that you are doing as the world is made new. Help us as we lean into this, as we take hold of it and we carry it. Even now we ask in the name of Christ our hope. Amen. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Speaker 1:And as always, if you have a moment to spare, we'd love for you to jump into the Zoom lounge. Our staff will be in there to say hello, to greet you, to say hi, but then also to offer you prayerful space. Look for the link in the description. And as we let you go, we leave you with the blessing to love God, to love people, and to tell the story. Peace to you this week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here.