Speaker 1: 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 comm.church for more information.
Speaker 2: Today, we are getting close to the end of our Eastertide series called the old songs. Now Eastertide is the fifty day celebration of resurrection that follows Easter Sunday, and we're using this season to stay in a festive mode by talking together about some of our favorite songs. Now, it's not just the songs that we sing together, although those are very important too. At Commons, we talk about being intellectually honest with our faith, but our second value has always been spiritually passionate. And I actually talked about this earlier in the year in a series about the Holy Spirit called the forgotten God.
But the roots of my Christian journey are actually in the Pentecostal tradition. And so over the years, I've matured and evolved and found new expressions and perspectives to add to my faith, but there's still a very deep appreciation and debt that I owe to those experiential encounters with the divine that often, in my life anyway, have come through music. And I'm continually floored by the talent and the gifts on display in our community, those that lead us every week as we sing together. I'm a terrible singer by the way. So if there are ever moments where I found myself caught up in the moment and singing close to you, close enough that you can hear it, I apologize for that.
And no one needs to be subjected to it. But that to say, as we talk about old songs, I also want to offer my gratitude to a community here that continues to sing and worship and even write new songs for us to sing. If you've not heard the song faithfully that was written by our creative teams here at Commons, you need to go to our YouTube channel after the service, find that video and check it out. It's beautiful and full of good theology too. So lots of thanks to all of our musicians.
In this series though, we are talking about old songs. And not just old songs that appear in hymn books or in the churches you grew up in. We are talking about the oldest songs in the Christian tradition. Those hymns that are buried throughout the New Testament. And what's interesting about those hymns is that they are all Christological in nature.
That's just our fancy way of saying that they are focused on Christ. But that's important for two reasons today. First, because I've already mentioned our values at common, intellectually honest and spiritually passionate, our third value has always been Jesus at the center. And so to root our imagination of Jesus in some of the earliest expressions of trust and worship, some of these hymns that preexisted even our scripture, I think that can be a really formative experience for those of us who want to ground our Christianity back in Christ. But second, it's Eastertide.
And in a world where everything moves very fast and we are through one thing and onto the next in the blink of an eye to remember that the church calendar calls us to slow down from time to time. To linger both in our waiting, which we do together through Lent, and in our celebration, which we do together in Eastertide, I think this is also really healthy. And so to return to songs, specifically Christological songs during Eastertide, this just feels very deeply appropriate to me. By the way, after the last couple years, if you've got something to celebrate, let Eastertide be your guide. That's my suggestion.
A birthday, an anniversary, a promotion, a new job. I say make every win count. Celebrate the heck of it all. It's 50 for every good drop of news these days. That's the Jesus way.
Take it home with you. We're doing birthday weeks from now on. You do you. That's it. Last week, we actually did some really good work.
It was a very busy sermon. We were looking at Ephesians two and in particular, a section in verses 14 to 18 that a lot of scholars think is a hymn that Paul is referencing. Now we have a lot to cover today as well, so we're gonna skip a recap, But you can catch up on our YouTube channel or on our podcast if you missed last week. It was a lot of fun, at least I thought so. So check it out if you missed it.
Today, we're gonna work through one song and move toward another one. First though, let's pray together. God of good songs, who composes new words and melodies and stories for each of us every single day. Might we recognize today that wherever we find ourselves in this moment, joy or pain or loss or celebration, you have offered us good words to sing in these moments. Might we know that we are not on our own to express ourselves.
That sometimes when our words fail us, we can return to the words of community to find solace and strength for ourselves. There is a beauty in our creativity expressed, but there is also a comfort in returning to the words and the work and the liturgy of your people. And we pray that we might find space for both of them in our lives. As we speak today of another song, another expression of our shared trust in you, we ask that your spirit would be near to us, bringing clarity and understanding, and ultimately conviction to our patterns in the world to uphold the neighborly love that you demonstrate for us. May all that we learn translate into more love in how we live.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Okay. Today, we are gonna make our way toward the book of Hebrews. But to get there, we're actually going to look at a couple of songs along the way.
Still, we are gonna talk about wish lists, Greek gods, ancient hymns, and your story. However, before all of that, in each week of this series, since we're talking about songs, I have made a reference to a contemporary song. And we've broken down the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar. We've talked about the story behind Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. And some of you have probably been wondering about when we're going to get to Pearl Jam.
Now, I gave them a shout out in the first week of this series, but we haven't been back. And, well, we're here. Because as an entry point into today, I wanna talk about the song Wish List. Now Wish List is sort of a b side. So you may not have heard this one, but it is a great song.
It's definitely not one of their bigger hits. It is kind of a quirky song though. It doesn't really have a chorus. It's literally just a list that Vetter sings. But Eddie Vetter said that the song came out of a warm up exercise the band was doing as they were preparing to write actual songs for the album Yield.
So the band found a groove and they vamped and Eder just started singing in a stream of consciousness to get the creative juices going. Now Eder says this went on for about eight minutes. And after the exercise was done, they thought it was pretty cool. So they went back and listened to the recording, and they loved it. Eder picked out some of the best lines that he had spong spontaneously, and that was the song.
Literally written on the fly in one take. So here's some of the lyrics that made it into the actual edited album version of the song. I wish I was a neutron bomb for once I could go off. I wish I was a sacrifice but somehow still lived on. I wish I was a sentimental ornament you hung on, the Christmas tree.
I wish I was the star that went on top. I wish I was the evidence. I wish I was the grounds for 50,000,000 hands upraised and open toward the sky. I wish I was a sailor with someone who waited for me. I wish I was as fortunate, as fortunate as me.
I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good. I wish I was the full moon shining off your Camaro's hood. I wish I was an alien at home behind the sun. I wish I was the souvenir you kept your house key on. I wish I was the pedal brake that you depended on.
I wish I was the verb to trust and never let you down. What a great song. Right? By the way, I've heard them do this song live and better added the line, I wish I could remember all the words to this darn song, which was also just awesome when they did it. What I love about this song, at least today, is the idea that there's really only ever one thing that we wish for.
Every line in the song is ultimately about wanting to be loved. Right? Yet we search for that. In fact, we actually find that in an endless list of experiences and moments. That line about the full moon shining off a Camaro's hood, that's a reference to Vetter's wife at the time who drove a Camaro.
Eddie's wishing to be near her even as he could feel their relationship starting to slip away. They were divorced about a year after this song was released. But the song isn't an endless, insatiable wish list. It's actually about how everything that we wish for is a part of a core human desire to be known and loved. All of our list come down to one thing.
And that's meaningful because both of our old songs today are about a very similar idea. The idea that we can search for God, we can encounter God, we even find God in an endless array of ways, but all of that searching inevitably comes home in the person of Jesus. But to get there, let's talk about the place of hymnody in the Greco Roman world for a moment here. Because in this series, we started by talking about the place of songs in Christian community. Paul seems to see his use of songs as a nod to the interdependence of community.
Right? We're all part of one body, he suggests, and we all bring different gifts to that same body. But to make that more than just a talking point, to actually demonstrate it, Paul seems to value the incorporation of different voices and songs in his teaching. We've seen this in both the Colossian hymn and the Ephesian hymn. We're going see it again next week in the Philippian hymn as well.
But this is also something Paul does very comfortably with Greco Roman poets outside the Christian community. There's this famous story where Paul is preaching in Athens and he goes to the Europagus, which was sort of like the central market in town and he begins to preach at a spot called Mars Hill. Except this is Athens and he's speaking to an overwhelmingly Gentile, non Jewish, Roman audience. And so instead of his normal shtick, which would be to go to the local synagogue and talk about Jesus and build a coalition from his interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures. This time, he knows that he needs to find a new shared starting point.
By the way, finding a shared starting point is a good advice for all of us who find ourselves in delicate conversations. Now Adam Grant, his great book Think Again, which is all about how we change our minds as human beings, talks about the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. Trust me, I know that's a touchy subject these days. But regardless of where you sit on that spectrum, Grant's point in his chapter is actually, look, health professionals, they won't get anywhere until they can enter a conversation acknowledging, trusting that the person they are talking to is doing what they think is best for themselves and those that they love. If we assume bad motives from the start, our conversations are undercut from the beginning.
Now, that doesn't mean we don't have convictions. We all need to know our convictions when we enter a conversation. But the more that we can assume good motives, even from those who see the world differently than us, the more fruitful our conversations will be. In fact, I think this. I think this is lesson number one for being married.
Look, I have lots of opinions about lots of things, and I'm game to argue about most of them at drop of a hat. For twenty one years, I've been doing that with my wife Rachel. But when I am able to remind myself to always assume the best about my partner's intentions even when we disagree, it opens up the dialogue that Rachel and I can have. Now, let me throw out a caveat here. Sometimes people show you who they are, and they show you that they do not have good motives, and that's okay to respond with appropriate boundaries.
That's important too. But still, I think we should work to look for what we share with someone rather than jump to our differences. At least when that's possible. And that is exactly what Paul does here in Athens. There's no synagogue starting point, so what does he do?
He starts with some Greek songs. In Acts 17, he says, people of Athens, I see that you in every way are very devout. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription to an unknown god. That was a real statue in Athens, by the way. And the thought was kind of like, look, just in case we forgot a God, maybe we should put up a statue with a plaque that says unknown.
And that way, if that God ever comes to town, they'll see that and assume we were talking about them and they'll give us a pass. But Paul says, guys, I love it because I know that God, the one that you've been looking for. He says, the God that made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands as if God needs anything. Rather God gives life and breath and everything to everyone. For as your own poets have said, in him we live and move and have our being, we are his offspring.
Now, what Paul is doing here is actually quoting from two Greek poets. The first is a line from Epimenides who wrote a poem about a Cretian king about six hundred years before Paul. And that poem said, they fashioned a tomb for thee, oh whole and highly one. Those Crecians always liars, evil beasts with idle bellies. But thou art not dead, thou live and abide forever for in thee we live and move and have our being.
The second is a line from the poet, Phaenomena. He lived about three hundred years before Paul and he's actually writing about Zeus and he says this, let us begin with Zeus. Never let us leave him unmentioned. All the ways are full of Zeus, the sea is full of him and so are the harbors. In every way we have all to do with Zeus for truly we are his offspring.
Now, if you read the line in Acts and as it appears in your bible, in him we live and move and have our being, truly we are his offspring. That kinda glides past pretty easily. Nothing too controversial there. And yet when you hear those quotes in their original context, you start to realize just how open Paul was to looking for what he shared with those around him. Remember, Paul is a Jewish man.
He is no fan of Cretian kings or Roman gods. And yet, in the pursuit of a dialogue, this is where he chooses to start from. We all have the same wish list. We're all looking for the same thing. In some ways, all of us have even found some truth.
But I think I know where that story goes. That's what he says. Now, the reason this works for Paul is because hymns and poems occupied a very different place in the ancient world than they do today. We can talk about a Marvel movie. Right?
And I can pretty confidently, I think, reference the Avengers in a sermon, and no one here will be left out. On the other hand, if I quoted one of the most popular poets around today, maybe Billy Collins, might be a little less familiar to some of us. In the ancient world, however, perhaps in the absence of CGI, hymns about the gods, this was superhero fodder. Like, these were everywhere. This was just part of pop culture.
Matthew Gordley, who's a scholar who studies specifically ancient hymnody writes, hymns and hymn singing were important features of Greek and Roman public life. Hymns were composed in praise of gods in connection with several aspects of society including the cult offering of sacrifice, but also public thanks and praise, large public festivals, and even more intimate banquets known as symposia. Accordingly, hymns played important roles not only for religious rituals, but also in shaping culture, teaching values, promoting particular ways of viewing the world. What that means is that Paul could very reliably quote Greco Roman poets and trust that those references would land because people in the ancient world were just used to singing hymns together all the time. Now I joked about this way back in the first week of this series, but outside of church, this is something that we've kind of largely lost as a society.
Like, rarely do people in Canada just get together and sing a song. Still, if you're watching a European football game, for example, you'll see that this kind of thing still does exist in the world. I remember the first time I saw an MLS game live about a decade ago. It was in Portland. And that was years ago when they were trying to replicate that European experience, and so they actually handed you a song sheet when you came into the stadium so that you could sing along.
That was a blast. It's kinda silly, but these weren't just chants though. That's the thing. It's not like a flames game. These were like full on songs with call and response and a mascot that acted like a choir director more than just entertainment.
But It was about more than just cheering for the team because I had nothing invested in the Portland timbers. Who cares? But this was a great experience. This kind of thing though was happening all the time in the first century as a normal part of life. Roman people would have just sang the songs of Epimenides and Final Mina.
And the Christian community actually would have sung the songs that we've studied in this series. Not in big worship services like we're doing right now, but at meals and parties and on walks and just whenever they got together with friends. Hymns were just simply embedded in life. But remember that and then think about what Paul is doing here in Athens. By starting with the hymns of his audience, he's saying, your experience of the world is valid.
And yes, he wants to say it's incomplete. He wants to offer his perspective and point to Jesus, but he starts by saying, There's already more that binds us together than you realize. Now hold on to that and let's take a quick look together at the opening of the book of Hebrews Because there we find another of the earliest hymns that shaped the Christian community. Now, this one is probably not a preexisting song the writer is quoting. Instead, this one, more like the prologue of John, is probably a hymn the writer is composing for the church.
But this is what the song says. In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways. We'll come back to this line. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son whom God appointed heir of all things and through whom also God made the universe. Notice here, same theme from John and from Colossians restated again this idea that the world is somehow made in and through Christ for us.
The sun is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of God's being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty in heaven. So in this series so far, we've had Jesus as the word of God that was logos in John. We've seen Jesus as the image of God that was icon in Colossians. Now we've got Jesus as the exact representation of God.
The word here is character in Greek. And literally, it means God pressed into or embossed in the world. One more line in the poem here. Verse four, but through that he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs. Okay.
Couple things to help make sense of this poetry here. The whole theme of the book of Hebrews is comparison. This is great, but this is even better. And the writer does that all throughout the book. It's one of the things you want to keep in mind if you're reading Hebrews.
Because the writer is constantly building a basis for agreement and then pointing to something that's even better over and over again. They just really like this rhetorical strategy. But the comparison here in this opening hymn is between sons and messengers. And I know that you just read angels and you immediately started thinking of wings and harps and that's fine. The writer absolutely wants to play with that imagery.
But the theme here is actually grounded in the idea of royalty. See the word in Greek can mean angel, but at its root it means messenger or emissary of a king. In fact, the reason that angels are called in Greek is because they are the emissaries of God. But since here, God is actually referred to using the title the majesty, it helps us to situate these images in their royal setting. So it's messenger that's front and center here.
And the comparison that's being made is, hey, it's great that God has sent all of these messengers all of the time, but you know what would be even better? What if the king sent us a son? It's an idea. It's very rooted in the politics of the ancient world, but you can see the logic here. A messenger speaks on behalf of a king.
A son is a representation of the king. It's like having the king pressed into us. Okay. Let's go back to the beginning now. In the past, God spoke through our ancestors, through the prophets at many times and in various ways.
Fortunately, we don't have the time to talk about all of the layers of poetry here, but just in this one sentence. We have the words, that's many times. We have, that's many ways. We have, that's a long time ago. We have, that's ancestors or fathers.
And we have, that's prophets. The first sentence of Hebrews basically reads, It's not meant to be a tongue twister, but it's not not meant to be one either. I mean, this is clearly done intentionally. But it's these first two words that caught my attention this week. The verse begins, And both of those words are forms of the same word, which means many, but it's more than that.
It means a multitude. It literally means a number too great to count. So the first thought of the book of Hebrews is found in a hymn that begins, God has spoken in more ways than you can count, more times than you can imagine, through more avenues than you think, and all of that communication has been leading us to Jesus. And of course, it's primarily the Hebrew scriptures that are in view here, but it's more than that. It's all the ways that God has been present all through history.
Also, all of the moments of divine disclosure in all of the lives of all of the people who have found their way to this hymn. All of it, we are being told, was, is God. And it was incomplete. It was messengers from messengers, but all of it was leading you somewhere. It was bringing you home to Jesus.
But do you see how that first line of one of the earliest songs of the Christian faith grounds our entrance into community in that same expansive welcome that Paul roots his evangelism? An openness to the diversity of human experience, a welcome for you to bring your whole story however it has wound its way to here. A conviction that we are all of us searching to know and be known and God has been present in all of it. Because God has been pulling and leading and pleading and waiting and trusting and walking with all of us long before any of us had any of the words to name what was happening to us. All of it was God.
And maybe that in itself is the encouragement that you need to keep searching. This reminder that your wish list is valid And your poems are important. And your encounters with the divine, they are. They have always been real. And that the grace and the peace of Jesus stands not in opposition to you and your story and where you come from, but with open arms ready to embrace absolutely everything you bring with you today.
See, the best songs are the ones that we see ourselves reflected in. And over and over again, the hymns of the New Testament are singing our songs back to us, reminding us that here we are home. Let's pray. God, thank you for all of the songs that woven together create our lives. The hard ones and the joyful ones, the ones of celebration and the songs of lament.
All of the stories that have shaped us and made us who we are. And in that, in that acknowledgement and thanks, we recognize that you have been present all the way along at every moment of our journey. Even when we didn't recognize you, even when sometimes we pushed away from you, all of it, you were there. God, now as we are drawn closer to the story of your son, to the heart of all of our longing to be known all you, we recognize that every moment of our story was sacred and holy because you were in it shaping us. God, might this become an invitation for us to look back on our lives, to see how it was all important, to see how it was all part of who we are, but also then to turn that same eye towards those that we encounter.
To see your presence there in their life, the divine shining through in everyone that we encounter. And then when we can, to find the ways and the words to point that out, to recognize your presence in those that we meet and to name it and celebrate it. And in that, to allow all of us to bring our full selves to you into the light, closer to your son, to be transformed into the people you always have imagined us to be. May we know that all of our story is welcome here in the warm, gracious embrace of the Christ. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray.
Amen.