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My Big Loud Mouth Part 2: Luke 9
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Eastertide, this glorious time after the coming of Easter light where we give ourselves to chasing the sun and where we open our hearts to let in more of its warmth and where we begin to tell the story again of how redemption doesn't wait for us to go and earn it or claim it. No, it comes and it finds us where we are. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Well, hello again, everyone. For those I haven't met before either online or in person back when we did that, My name is Scott, and I'm excited to be jumping into this teaching space today in part because we've just started a new series, My Big Loud Mouth. And as a verbal processor, which is just a complimentary way of saying that sometimes I don't know when to stop talking, I feel like these ideas hit close to home, and I'm excited about this opportunity to consider the things we say and the ways that the scriptures can help us if we pause and listen for a moment. And last week, Jeremy took on a phrase that gets floated out there from time to time when we say something like, God has a plan.
Speaker 1:How if we aren't careful, phrases like these shortcut our ability to walk with others in really difficult situations when we impose a false sense of certainty onto their human experience, which is anything but certain. And Jeremy invited us to take a more patient and empathetic approach, offering care instead of theological sound bites. And I love how this got me thinking about how we can join God in creating meaning, encouraging each other along the way, even in life's darkest stretches. Now, that said, there's another reason why I'm pumped to be with you today and that's because I haven't been teaching much lately. And just like so many of you, our work here as common staff has changed so much in the past month and as a team, we are all adapting.
Speaker 1:And for me, one of the things that's meant is that I've spent less time prepping and delivering sermons than I would have been. However, some of you are aware that just as this pandemic hit, I was preparing to finish a project that I'd been working on since before we moved back to Calgary, and I ended up successfully defending my PhD thesis during Holy Week, which was a little crazy. And the truth is that I'm so grateful to my amazing colleagues at Commons, all the ways they've adjusted and helped to make reaching this milestone possible, and I am thankful for a community like ours that has encouraged this work I'm interested in. But also, reaching this personal objective that lots of you weren't really aware of has got me thinking about all the ways that so many of you are still moving forward. Despite restrictions and setbacks, you're pushing ahead in relationships and you're maintaining your health, you're moving forward with professional and personal projects while taking on new skills and learning to take new risks.
Speaker 1:Some of you are growing your families in this moment and I just wanted to take a second and remind you to look at that and to mark these days how in all that's happening you are still forming a life that's guided by grace which is what Eastertide calls us to, this season after Easter where we think about and do our best to live resurrection. And we're gonna come back to this before we're done today, so hold on to it. Because now we need to take on another phrase that finds its way out of our mouths from time to time, those powerful words, I hate you, which is gonna take some work. So let's pause for a moment and pray. God, you are with us now stretched near and far, but we are community, and we are drawn by your goodness.
Speaker 1:And so we're grateful for this time that we share we're grateful for an opportunity to reflect to come again to ancient truths that can give us contemporary light so guide us now we pray in the name of Christ Amen. So today in order to move forward we need to think a little bit about what needs to be said, the myth of pure evil, and the harshest voice of all and to do this we're going to look at the Hebrew Bible for a few minutes and then we're gonna take a look at two brief stories from the life of Jesus, but first, we time warped back to 1999 or around then to a time before any of us knew anything about smartphones and weapons of mass destruction, In fact, this is back before I would admit that I'm actually okay with some romantic comedies. Well, I'm actually okay with more than some, but I'll leave that for a different sermon. Anyway, in 1999 was the year that the film, 10 Things I Hate About You was released and if you want to add a guilty trip down memory lane to your quarantine list, especially if you came of age during the nineteen nineties, then this is a solid option.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a bunch of future stars in this movie obviously, but also as a film that came out nearly twenty years before Me Too became part of our vocabulary, it actually articulates a legitimate feminist anger that is ahead of its time. But I don't wanna spoil any more of it for those of you who are obviously gonna go and check it out, except to say that I still remember one of the film's pinnacle scenes where Catherine who's played by Julia Stiles, she stands and she reads a poem to her high school English class and actually the class is just listening because she's reading it to her love interest, a young Heath Ledger playing Patrick. And in it, she lists, you guessed it, the 10 things she hates about him. The problem is that her hate is kinda conflicted. I hate it when you're not around, she closes the poem.
Speaker 1:And the fact that you didn't call but mostly I hate the way I don't hate you, not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all. And then she leaves the room in tears, hashtag all the feels and even if this cultural reference totally dates me and misses you, one of the things it highlights is something that we have to recognize as we start this conversation, that so often the harshest things we say are directed at those we care about a lot and this isn't really a mystery right? Because the threat of pain or trauma at the hands of those who love us or did or should have, those experiences will get us saying the meanest things and I want to acknowledge that this pandemic moment we're in, the ways that it has you trapped inside with the people you lovehate most, Has you separated from those you care about or despise most? Or it has you reflecting on all these kinds of relationships and the things you said in them, we shouldn't be surprised by this And we would do well to be honest about the need to step toward forgiveness for the wounds that we carry, for the wounds we've caused, for the ways we haven't been able to keep our mouth shut.
Speaker 1:And we've actually talked a lot about this as a community, and our series called Ashes from a couple years ago is a great resource if you're looking for some ways to press for forgiveness in your story because we don't make light of how important that work is and we don't underestimate how tough it can be, which is part of why I mention how the harsh things we say often come from a contested place in us. It's also why I think it's important to admit how nuanced the scriptures are when they talk about these strong words and these strong emotions and these strong responses in us. Let me give you an example that you might find familiar. In the Hebrew Bible text called Ecclesiastes, the ancient poet there thinks deeply about the conflicted nature of human experience and the book comes to a point of clarity when in the third chapter the poet strings together a series of phrases, There is a time for everything and a season for every activity, a time to be born and a time to die. In verse five, they say that there's a time to embrace and a time for social distancing or something like that and then right near the end the poet states that there's a time to be silent and a time to speak and in verse eight, a time to love and a time to hate.
Speaker 1:And for the record, biblical scholars like to point out that this particular author has a tendency to be a little melancholic and vague which is how some of you would just say all poets are, I get it. The thing with Ecclesiastes and this particular way of looking at the world, on one hand it's naming the ways that our experience takes us through so many seasons and on the other, well the poet's emphasizing that we don't always control what season we're in, which is why it's important to do a bit more than take this phrase, a time to hate, as permission to say and do our worst. To understand the poet's angle, we need to consider how the Hebrew bible uses this verb that gets translated as hate, the Hebrew word saneh. A couple examples here that are representative, there are instances where this word gets turned into a descriptive noun, like where Leah, wife of Jacob the patriarch, refers to herself as the one not loved, the hated one. Or in the story of Joseph, it's used to describe how Joseph's brothers despised him for being a tattletale and a punk.
Speaker 1:In the Psalms, the word appears a lot, used by Hebrew writers there to describe how they feel about those around them who are doing terrible things, like in Psalm 26 where the poet says, I abhor or hate the assembly of evildoers and I refuse to sit with the wicked. And then in Proverbs 19, we see the word used to describe a society. The poor are shunned or hated by all their relatives and their friends avoid them. Though the poor pursue them with pleading, they are nowhere to be found. Which just goes to show that harshness, that this tendency to resist, this propensity we have to lash out, how the scriptures use language that allows for the fact that we don't always get it right and that we don't always get it wrong.
Speaker 1:I mean, in the story of Leah, God intervenes for her and the hated one becomes one with a blossoming family. In the story of Joseph, God works through the hatred of his brothers to save Egypt and Israel. We see how the proverbs paint a picture of those victimized by hateful neglect, drawing attention to the despised ones, And then we see how the psalmist resists and antagonizes evil, speaking heated words of righteous action as worship, which is maybe what we need to consider when we come back to the hard words we speak to those we're conflicted about. See, because in some instances, your strong words are needed as a cry for self respect or for recognition where you ask someone who's hurt you to really see your pain and to own their mistake. Maybe words that are an assertion of your will to distance yourself from harm or from bad decisions or from patterns that have held you back before.
Speaker 1:In some instances, maybe as a demand for justice, a fierce call to your neighborhood, to your coworkers, to your city, insisting on compassion for those around you who are ridiculed and forgotten. In each case, these kinds of powerful words affirm the truth that the opposite of love for self, for family, for those in need, it's not hate, it's indifference. And perhaps you'll realize that if you've been crying for restoration and for courage and for change, you're not being rash and unfaithful. No. In fact you're living in a time with words that must be spoken which I realize might make it sound like a free pass to say what we want, to really speak our minds when we feel justified and I imagine that most of us know that's not true.
Speaker 1:We probably all have a sketchy track record where like Mac Miller, we might say that my regrets look like texts I shouldn't send and I mean, I've sent a torrent of a text back to a friend that I shouldn't have, that hasty Facebook reply, that harsh and loud reply to someone with a differing political opinion. There's more than a few times I've said a variation of, I don't like you so quickly and I imagine you've got your own list like that, which just confirms the reality that while we all might not have said, I hate you to someone who heard us, we have a really hard time holding back harsh words when we run into difference. Just this week, one evening, I was minding my own social media business and I'm just scrolling my best quarantine life and I came across a post from a friend from another faith community here in the area and this post expressed a political opinion about our current moment and it cited a source that I did not anticipate, respect, or appreciate and so I did what any of us would do, I tapped comment and then I thought better of it and I sent a personal message instead which sounds noble until you fast forward two days later where I'm literally just writing this friend an editorial takedown of his intellectual position and then I had to carefully edit out all of the undue harshness that had just come blurting out of me, which would be such a convenient sermon illustration if it wasn't such a blatant revelation of what's going on inside of me sometimes, and more importantly, it actually left me laughing when I remembered the text that I was thinking about for today.
Speaker 1:See, in Luke nine, there's this interesting series of interconnected stories and here's what happens, Jesus is getting ready to head to Jerusalem and the story goes that his disciples start arguing among themselves who's gonna be greatest in this new situation that Jesus is working out, in this new kingdom that's coming. And the text says that Jesus knew their thoughts and I'm thinking he just heard them being petty and juvenile, but anyway, Jesus brings a small child that's standing nearby, brings them into the circle and he tells his disciples, whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me for it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest. It's a familiar story, okay? But then there's a second scene, in the very next verse we see John, one of the disciples, he pipes up and he says, Jesus, we just saw someone helping people in your name and we tried to stop him obviously because he's not one of us. And Jesus replies and says, Don't stop him for whoever is not against you is for you.
Speaker 1:And then there's a third scene, then the next verse says that Jesus consents that things are coming to an end so he leaves for Jerusalem and their little group has to pass through a Samaritan village so Jesus sends some disciples ahead to make arrangements but the people in that village don't welcome him and his followers because they're Jewish. Now remember, the Samaritans are those living in this part of the country just North of Jerusalem and their history is a little fuzzy, but basically they're a mixed race people. They're the remnants of this Jewish Northern kingdom that had been conquered and then intermarried and blended with the surrounding peoples. So to observant Jews, they are cultural traitors and they're resisting Jesus who is going to Jerusalem, the only acceptable site for Jewish worship, which just means that the Samaritans are wrong here. They're wrong sociopolitically because they're part of this other group and they're wrong theologically because they're resisting Jews who are trying to do what the law instructs, which is why the story says that James and John, two of Jesus' disciples, they see this offensive behavior and quite justifiably they ask, Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?
Speaker 1:And Jesus turns and rebukes them and they continue their journey. And maybe you didn't catch it because we were moving through that sequence so quickly but there's an interesting hint of a continuum here I think. The disciples arguing between themselves who's the best. The disciples bothering those who are doing Jesus' work but with a different group and then the disciples getting furious enough with people from another religious and ethnic group to commit divinely sanctioned murder. And yeah, there's a lot going on in this passage but there's also some really helpful instruction for us like how all hate starts with unnecessary comparison, How the cultivation of difference with those you love might lead to some playful banter, some talk about who's best, some jockeying for moral high ground, but how this has a way of culminating in us, wishing ill on our enemies.
Speaker 1:Oh sure, we might not wanna call down fire from heaven but there are some dark places in us too. Like when we aren't sad to see those people laid off, we aren't sad to hear that they're sick, We find ourselves wishing that they would just not be around, which is a perspective that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the myth of pure evil. This ultimate self serving bias that has us comparing ourselves to our partners and our friends and our loved ones and then culminates in us construing those people over there. Those people posting those things, those people who believe that or lead or say or control in ways we cannot stand, we imagine them as evil and we forget that they are the child that Jesus picks up and brings into the circle to subvert all our hate. A reminder for us that one of the greatest antidotes to all our awful words is to welcome each other as little ones as much as is possible with care and wisdom.
Speaker 1:Now, I get it. I can almost feel how those stories catch us because many of us might be aware of the intellectual walls we've built to protect our perspectives. Some of these we've actually worked pretty hard on and along the way we've done our best to try to be kind to others and when kindness is impossible, then at least we try to be fair to those we know are so different from us. But maybe something today has triggered a memory of something you've said. Maybe as we've been thinking about these things, you've realized how hard your heart has gotten lately.
Speaker 1:How far maybe you've strayed from some promises you made, how often you've been saying regrettable things to people who you love while you're isolated and it's in this moment that the harshest voice of all seems to cut through or maybe you're quietly judging yourself. You're comparing your April 2020 self to your January 2020 self and the words that come out are anything but kind, they're just cold and resentful and in light of this, as someone with an internal self critic that has a big loud mouth, I feel it's my responsibility to remind you of the season that we are in together. Eastertide, this glorious time after the coming of Easter light where we give ourselves to chasing the sun and where we open our hearts to let in more of its warmth and where we begin to tell the story again of how redemption doesn't wait for us to go and earn it or claim it, no, it comes and it finds us where we are, which is an idea that comes from my favorite Eastertide story and I'm gonna tell it to you quickly. See, at the end of John, Jesus appears to his friends in Jerusalem after his death and then they all disperse and some of them make their way back to their old stomping grounds including Peter.
Speaker 1:You guys remember him? Jesus's right hand man who was so sure he'd be there to protect and he'd posted or he boasted so loudly of his intentions and then he'd so publicly denied Jesus, who now is likely still hating himself. And one morning the disciples are fishing and Jesus shows up on the beach and he's made breakfast for everybody and then he kind of corners Peter as they are finishing and Jesus looks at him, this man who had let him down and abandoned him and said that he never knew him and Jesus asks Peter three times, Do you love me? Three times he gives Peter a chance to claim resurrection life. Three times he gives Peter an offer to spurn self hatred and fear for love And for me, that lakeside breakfast is the thumbnail image of Eastertide.
Speaker 1:This moment each year where our imagination resets and we remember that the story we tell invites us to live a new life again. And where the words we've said in error and the harshness that's held us in check for too long, big, loud words, how these are drowned out by the quiet whisper of mercy that always comes to find us. So may you walk confidently into resurrection life this week. May you find courage and grace to say the words that need to be spoken right now. May your mouth offer words of welcome for those you meet that are different and may the harshest voice of all, your own, fall quiet in Eastertide peace.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, we are present now to your work in us. We're present to so many of the things that have been said to us and maybe to the things that we have said. And we ask that you would give us courage as we push toward the work of forgiveness in these areas. But then too we ask for courage to do the work of speaking words that need to be said in this time that we find ourselves.
Speaker 1:We're so aware of all the craziness going around and we're so aware of the ways that we are different from each other in this time. And so we ask that you would give us grace to welcome one another, to speak words of care and invitation and to treat each other as little ones. Even as we learn to trust your gentle, tender invitation in this season to come and to live and love again. But the harsh words we speak to ourselves that these have no place in the redemption you're bringing to bear. We pray this in the name of Christ our hope.
Speaker 1:Amen. Thanks for joining us today. It's been so good to be together and wherever you are, we invite you to jump into the Zoom lounge to say hi. You can request prayer there with someone from our team as well. Just grab the link.
Speaker 1:Before we sign off, just a quick heads up that next week we are going to celebrate the Eucharist together during our online services. So if you're gonna join us, we ask you to prepare some elements for that moment. Be ready. And with that said, we send you into Eastertide with this. Love God.
Speaker 1:Love people. Tell the story. Peace to you all.