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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Anyway, my name is Jeremy. If we haven't met, it's great to be back. I've been away from teaching for the last two weeks because I had the opportunity to do some study down at North Park University in Chicago, and I'm very grateful for that. So thank you to Kevin and to Joel for filling in during that period for me. One of the amazing things about this community is how quickly we've been able to develop a really great team of teaching voices.
Speaker 1:And we are much stronger together and better off as a community with that plurality of voices and perspectives being shared. And so later this summer, as we move into a series on the Psalms, we're gonna have more opportunity to have some of those different voices come and share with us on Sundays. And I'm looking forward to that as well. We're also working to expand those voices as we think about planting new parishes and locations in the coming season as well. Now that said, for the next few weeks at least, you are stuck with me.
Speaker 1:And regardless of you feel about that, I'm glad to be back here. So there are, however, a couple things that I feel I need to address before we move into the teaching today. First of all, it's Father's Day, and we have already celebrated our dads with root beer, which to us seemed like the second best thing we could think of. But once again, I am here with a microphone, and so I wanted to take a moment to add a couple of my thoughts quickly here. Because I recognize that not everyone here in this room has positive emotions associated with this day.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, the joy of celebrating dad is mixed with the memory of the fact that he's gone. So there is a gap in your heart today in this moment. Now for some of us, the thought of celebrating a person who has been absent to us is hard. Now for some of us, wounds that perhaps have long since healed feel like they are somehow opened again in moments like these. And for myself, my father was and is an extraordinary man who in his quiet and stable way has done more to shape me than I am even conscious of.
Speaker 1:But in the light of all of the stories collected here in this room, I do not take the gift of my father lightly. And so my prayer is that in whatever way you have experienced father in your life, you might come to experience the deep and abiding love that was intended when we appropriated the language of father to speak of our God. May your experience of the divine today begin to heal those memories that are hard. May your experience of the divine today bring life back into memories that are good. May your experience of the divine today continue to enliven and transform and make whole your experience of father, ever that experience has been to this point.
Speaker 1:And just in case he's listening, here on the podcast, thanks dad, here's one for you. A ham sandwich walks into a bar and orders a beer, and the bartender says, sorry, we don't serve food here. Hashtag dad joke. Though some of you are still trying to figure that one out, that's okay. I will give you a moment.
Speaker 1:But second, I want to mention this. We have witnessed this week the incredible pain that evil can inflict on our world. That pain came in a very targeted strike against one of the most vulnerable communities in our society. And yes, this was an act against all of humanity, but we also should not pretend that it wasn't perpetrated out of a very specific hatred. And so today, we want to begin with a deep recognition of and an apology for the ways in which the church has not only refused to stand up for the rights and dignity of the LGBTQ plus community, but has at times to our shame actively worked to suppress and dehumanize our brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1:Regardless of theology, when people are treated as less than, when basic human dignities are not afforded, and when civil liberties are not extended to all peoples in society, then that animus and hatred grows into the types of toxic outcomes we saw recently in Orlando. This is not about politics. This is about our refusal to recognize each other as fully human. And if our theology can't make room for each other, then we have very little means left to reach out to God. So we do not take offense at the frustration, perhaps even the anger of the LGBT community.
Speaker 1:And we do not seek to minimize the church's culpability in the disenfranchisement of the LGBT community. Instead, we simply stand alongside our friends, and we mourn, and we grieve, and we hope together for a better tomorrow. Jesus wept, and so do we. Let's pray. Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden.
Speaker 1:Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your spirit so that we may truly love you and that we might grow to love each other, that we may praise your holy name through our obedience to your example of love. We, each of us here, need your healing this day in some way. At times, we have been hurt. Other times, we are the ones who have caused that hurt. In times like these, we see hurt in the world in ways that we can barely even begin to grasp.
Speaker 1:And so merciful God, give us clear confession and true repentance that we might begin to work for the best of what you call us into. May we speak our shortcomings, not with defensiveness or excuse, but with the confidence and the grace that welcomes and heals and transforms us from the inside out. As it is in heaven, joyful and peaceful, loving and graceful, healing and healthy. May it be here on earth as we follow after your son, Jesus. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. That's heavy, but it's important. And so perhaps it is also appropriate that we are about to talk about confession today. Because confession is something that we rarely do well.
Speaker 1:For example, I found out this week that BuzzFeed has an entire category of posts dedicated to confession. There's 16 confessions you know to be true if you love the Game of Thrones books. 14 very real confessions about what it's like to live with overprotective parents. 16 confessions your hairdresser will never tell you. How about this one?
Speaker 1:17 shockingly honest confessions from people who work at Tim Hortons. I don't know who wants to read that, but number one of which was that every time someone gives me a tip, I accidentally give them a bigger size than what they asked for. So keep that in mind. If you drink that type of dirty water on a regular basis. But in the world of church, confession also comes in a lot of different flavors.
Speaker 1:There's your standard garden variety confession, where you do something bad and then you look up probably slightly to the left and you say in your head, sorry God, my bad. There's the related version where you lay in bed at night to say your prayers and you do that last minute just before sleep overtakes you, Hail Mary pass. Listen God, also, I'm sorry for all the bad stuff I did today that I can't quite remember specifically right now. There's that exaggerated moment. The come to Jesus moment.
Speaker 1:The youth camp altar call moment. The blubbering tears and snotty Kleenex moment where you confess every deep dark secret that you can possibly bring to mind in the moment. And actually, all of those have their place in the Christian story. There is something very healthy about naming what goes sideways as it happens, as we notice it in real time. That one of the things that I have worked hard at to get better in my marriage is noticing when things are going sideways as they go sideways.
Speaker 1:I like to think that I've generally been pretty good about owning my mistakes. Going back and apologizing for them. I would like to get better at noticing and confessing and correcting as it happens. There is also something good and true about acknowledging how deeply ingrained our patterns of betrayal are, That we just simply don't notice our sin a lot of the time. Thomas Merton wrote a prayer that he tried to live by.
Speaker 1:My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you.
Speaker 1:I hope that I have that desire in all that I do. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road even though I may know nothing of it. Therefore, I will trust you always. Though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear.
Speaker 1:For you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. It's good to be humble, to recognize that grace covers more than we think that it does. And then there are those moments where to be overcome by grace and forgiveness and to grieve for all the ways that you have injured yourself or others or God, that can be a healing moment for us. So whether that is on your knees or at an altar, I'm not sure it matters, but there is a place for that kind of raw emotion in our confession. However, these are not the types of confession we're talking about today.
Speaker 1:So sorry, no altar call. Don't worry about that. And it's not that they're not important. It's simply that most of us in the Protestant tradition have a familiarity with that personal you and God type of confession. Confession.
Speaker 1:What we are often less familiar with is an interpersonal you and someone else type of confession. What we are likely even further afield from is a ritualistic regular you and someone else type of confession. Because that all seems, let's be honest, very Catholic to us. And so I wanna talk today about some of the differences and similarities between Catholic and Protestant approaches to confession. I wanna look at some of the scripture that calls us to a pattern of confession and why that can be healthy for us.
Speaker 1:And then I wanna move as we close towards a collective communal confession together as we close our time today. So first, let's talk about this Tiber divide. Because our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic church do have a very different way and approach to confession. That is they practice the confession of sins to a priest. Now the misconception sometimes is that Catholics believe that priests can forgive their sins.
Speaker 1:It's not quite how it works. The Catholic tradition affirms that only God can forgive a sin. But Roman Catholics based their practice on a couple very specific significant verses that seem to imply that humans do have a role mysterious as it may be in the process of forgiveness. So at the end of the gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples. And he says, starting in chapter 20 verse 21, peace be with you.
Speaker 1:As the father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that, he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven. Now, it's a very interesting passage, but it seems to be tied to a parallel in Matthew chapter 16 where Jesus says, I give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Speaker 1:Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. So let's talk about some of the things that are relevant for understanding what's going on here. And first of all, we need to understand that language is fluid. So forgiven here, this is the verb in Greek.
Speaker 1:It means to forgive, to release, to let go, or to send away. The verb not forgiven, is actually a different verb, and it means to hold on to, to seize, or to adhere tightly to. And so it's very possible that this is a paraphrase of the Matthew passage about binding and loosing. Remember, Jesus would have been speaking in Hebrew or possibly Aramaic, whereas the gospels as we have them are written in Greek. So they are already translations themselves.
Speaker 1:And it's likely that Matthew and John are simply translating similar ideas in slightly different ways, and that tends to be the scholarly consensus. But if that's the case, if this is indeed a parallel to Matthew 16 about binding and loosing, then this passage is not so much about the disciples getting to decide who is forgiven and who isn't, as much as it is about the practice and the patterns of the church, the pronouncement or the declaration of forgiveness through the story of Jesus. So the background context here is that the rabbis would have to constantly reinterpret the broad laws of Torah to make sense in new situations. And they would either bind their disciples to a certain interpretation. They would hold on to it.
Speaker 1:Or they would lose them from it because of a new context or situation. They would send it away. And so what Jesus seems to be saying in Matthew is that the church is also going to need to rely on the spirit of God as we continually interpret Jesus' teachings in new situations. We are constantly doing that. The church will have the authority in that sense to bind us to certain practices, to lose us from other ones, to speak on God's behalf in a sense, to declare or pronounce his grace and forgiveness in the world.
Speaker 1:And actually, up until this point, Catholics and Protestants are generally in agreement here. The actual forgiveness of sins is what God does for us. It is the church that creates practices that declare forgiveness in the world. Here we agree. Where we differ is in the question of precisely who Jesus is speaking to.
Speaker 1:Because this is all of this is in the plural here in this passage. So if you forgive anyone's sins, that you there is a plural. Now we don't have a y'all in Canadian English. Technically, is no y'all in any English, regardless of what my southern friends tell me. Although when it comes to translation, it would be helpful at times.
Speaker 1:Because Jesus is speaking to y'all here. And if you read a bit farther, you will see that here in this room, it's not just the disciples. It's actually a fairly motley crew of Jesus followers. There's a guy named Cleopas. There's the 11.
Speaker 1:And then there are quote, those that were with them. So whatever authority Jesus is bestowing here, it does not appear to be just for the disciples. It seems to be given to the church collectively. All y'all, if you will. And so that's really the major distinction between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of this passage.
Speaker 1:The Roman Catholic church sees this passage, this ability to declare the forgiveness and freedom that comes from God as a gift to the apostles who then gift it to their successors and who pass it down in an unbroken line to Catholic priests today. Protestants and by the way, Protestant is just a catch all term that we use to lump together all of the various Christian traditions that come out of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. But we tend to see this passage in a very similar way to our Catholic friends, but we see it as a gift to the collective community of Christ. That we all need to wrestle with how to interpret and bind and loose scripture, that we all need to speak forgiveness and grace to each other, that we all need to call for repentance and healing and change from each other at times. As first Peter says, as you come to him, the living stone rejected by humans but chosen by God, you also, plural again.
Speaker 1:Now like living stones are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood. So this gift to declare God's forgiveness and grace in the world, this is a gift even to you. You speak the divine grace that sits at the center of the universe with the breath that is in your chest. And this is a large gift that speaks the incredibly profound significance that God sees in you and I and in our words to each other. I like how George R.
Speaker 1:Beasley Murray frames it for us. He acknowledges that as Protestants, we may find the Catholic approach difficult to understand or even accept, but he writes, it is significant, however, that in the area of pastoral counseling, when dealing with sin and guilt, an authoritative word of forgiveness is sometimes required from a representative of the Lord of cross and resurrection. We churches have need to learn from one another. And this is important. Because even though we may approach confession differently from some of our brothers and sisters, what GRBM is pointing out here, and I really do hope that doctor Beasley Murray is called GRBM in real life by his friends, But what he's saying is that forgiveness is not simply a category of change in our ontological reality.
Speaker 1:It is also a personal pastoral identity that we come to inhabit through community. And sometimes, we need to have that spoken to us. One of the spaces that I have become intimately familiar with in my time as a pastor is the enormous gulf that sits between believing that we are forgiven and feeling that we are forgiven. See, we are social animals. And perhaps evolutionarily, we are wired to seek out not just physical safety, but social safety.
Speaker 1:In fact, this is one of the reasons that we love as human beings to in group and out group so viciously. My desire to draw lines and put up boundaries around me to exclude outsiders. This is not actually driven by my need to exclude them as much as it is by my need to feel safe on the inside of those walls. Walls. And when you and I, when we can agree together that they are on the outside, it makes us feel more secure together on the inside.
Speaker 1:We actually talked about this in our last series. Right? The scapegoat mechanism. That thing that we use to direct our anxiety at someone else so that we can feel better together about ourselves. So what is the one thing that will bring flames and Oilers fans together?
Speaker 1:Our shared ridicule of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Right? We have a scapegoat, now we feel better about ourselves. And we wanna feel safe in community, and so the quickest shortcut to that is to define the community very tightly against who is on the outside of our walls. Well, confession plays this powerfully dangerous middle ground in this push pull dynamic of social cohesion.
Speaker 1:Because feeling safe in community means wanting to be identified in community, but it also means wanting to be fully present and vulnerable. That's what we really want. And so anything less than that, it creates a sense of either cognitive dissonance because we're not really present to people, or a sense of latent anxiety because we're worried about being found out by people. A sense that we're not really what we say we are, that we're being afraid of being found out for who we really are. So the idea of confessing to another person, this idea of being honest about our truth, this idea of sharing our boundary crossing with someone who's on the inside, this presents us with both the thing that we most deeply want, to be fully present and vulnerable and the thing that we are most deeply afraid of, the fact that they might reject us.
Speaker 1:And so we confess our sins to God. And we know intellectually that we're forgiven by the one who really matters. There there is even a sense of freedom and release and grace and peace that comes through that perhaps. And yet sometimes, somehow, ironically, we feel even more isolated in community. Because that freedom and that release and that grace and peace that we've now experienced from the divine heart of God, we can't share that in community with those around us.
Speaker 1:We can't share that without risking being rejected by the person who sits beside us in church. So we know we are forgiven, and yet that doesn't always translate into feeling forgiven. That's what Beasley Murray is talking about. He's saying that sometimes you need to hear someone say it. And not in the generic sense of what I'm doing right now, but in the very specific sense of someone who knows you and your story and your transgression.
Speaker 1:And they look you in the eye, and they say it's okay. This doesn't put you on the outside. Because forgiven is not simply our ontological category. It is that personal pastoral identity that we come to inhabit through community. And this is why the scriptures that affirm that only God can forgive sins also encourage us to confess to one another.
Speaker 1:And it's not because confessing to a brother or sister changes something in God, it's because that confession changes something in you. It takes that knowledge, and it drives it somewhere deep into your core. Listen to James here in chapter five as he talks about this. He says, is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray.
Speaker 1:Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them, to anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. By the way, that is something that we do here in this community.
Speaker 1:Not because we believe this in a mechanistic way. And if we do the right things, then God will be required to do the right things. But because we believe that God is always healing and raising and forgiving us and we want to be part of that divine flow. James says, the prayer offered in faith will make the person well. The Lord will raise them up.
Speaker 1:If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore, James said, confess your sins to one another and pray for each other that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Here's the question. What is that therefore, therefore?
Speaker 1:It is there to connect this idea of confession and prayer back to the entire pericope that we just read. This, therefore, is what we do in response to trouble, to joy, to sickness, to health, to grief, to loss, to abundance, and to grace. Confession and prayer, this is our response to all of life therefore. So I wanna suggest very quickly four simple reasons my you may want to consider a pattern of confession in your life. The first is very simply because it helps us consider where we've gone sideways.
Speaker 1:As beautiful and appropriate and necessary as Merton's prayer from earlier was, there is also beauty and honesty in considering our sin. So what do I need to take stock of? And what do I need to consider in new ways? What do I need to confess today? These are good questions to ask our ourselves.
Speaker 1:Second, confession pushes us to seek out trustworthy people in our lives. Here's my advice. If you don't know the person beside you right now, please do not confess all your deep dark circuits secrets to them at the end of this sermon. It's not appropriate. It likely won't be helpful, and it will probably make things awkward if you choose to sit in the same seat next week.
Speaker 1:So don't do that. So we'd be conscious of our need to confess to each other, but be equally vigilant about those who you choose to invite into that very vulnerable space in your life. Not everyone deserves your confession. Save it for those who do and seek them out in your life. Third, confession encourages.
Speaker 1:In fact, I would say it demands that we recognize our essential insufficiency. Now whether you recognize it or not, you need to be told that you are forgiven. You just don't have the necessary technology to move that from your head down into your heart on your own. We need people in our lives who speak the things we already believe to us. And that's okay because you weren't meant to do it on your own.
Speaker 1:You were designed for dependence. You were designed for the encouragement that comes from community, so lean into it And find the people who will speak the things you've come to believe about yourself. Finally, confession is about healing. And as we saw in James, I think very much he is tying confession to physical healing. I'm not gonna deny that.
Speaker 1:But there is so much more even in that passage of James chapter five. Because confession and prayer is about the presence and the coming of shalom in our lives, peace. That we might find healing in our bodies, but even more than that, that our cognitive dissonance and our anxiety about being found out, our sense of disassociation from the divine dance that is relationship could be healed and restored and somehow made whole again through our vulnerability to each other in community. That the grace of God could be made manifest through community as we embody confession and forgiveness for each other. That's what confession is about, that the transcendent grace of God could be made imminent in a moment of time and space.
Speaker 1:And so my prayer today is that you might begin in some sense to find the courage to experience those types of moments in your life. With grace and forgiveness of the divine invades a conversation and a moment with a brother or sister. That we would know the profound beauty of being completely at risk of being left on the outside of society, only to discover ourselves not only invited or welcomed, but actually already safe on the inside. Confessing in this way, it will not change anything in God, but it will change something in you. And so as we close today, I'd like to do something a little different.
Speaker 1:And I'd like us to pray a communal prayer of confession and forgiveness. Perhaps as a first step towards the vulnerability in your relationship with God, Or perhaps as an invitation into a pattern and ritual that you might seek out in the relationships with those around you. But I pray that even in this moment, the knowledge of your acceptance will begin to find its way from your head deep down into the core of your identity as a human being. That you might come to inhabit this personal pastoral identity you were created for. Loved and welcomed and accepted.
Speaker 1:Known and felt the words that we share with each other. So I'm gonna read the words on the screen, and then I'd ask that together we read the words in bold that follow. We praise you, oh God. We claim you as Lord. With all the earth, we worship you.
Speaker 1:With all the power seen and unseen, we declare the fullness of your majesty. With all the church in heaven and earth, the prophets, apostles, and martyrs before us. With the saints around us, worship you. Ever living father, ever loving son, ever present spirit. Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory, son of the father, you took upon yourself our salvation.
Speaker 1:In human birth, humbling yourself. In human death, conquering sin in the grave. In divine love opening your arms to all who would come, in almighty power ruler of all. We have squandered time, hoarded money, avoided challenges, and used others. We are sorry, God.
Speaker 1:Hear our repentance. We have doubted your care, mistrusted your providence, distorted our power, and ignored your love. We are sorry, God. Hear our repentance. You are savior and judge.
Speaker 1:Deal with us according to your mercy and not according to our merit. Forgive us now, we pray, and let us try again. Sensitive to your spirit and committed to your will. Amen. May you go in peace, hearing your forgiveness spoken this day and experiencing the truth of that acceptance in the core of your identity.
Speaker 1:Love God. Love people. Tell the story.