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5 Questions from the Lord's Prayer
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
And, it's nice to see a few Flames jerseys today. We're a little packed, which we normally are on Sunday, but I get the feeling that there are at least a few people here who are normally at church on Sunday night. But you're here in the morning because you wanna wanna watch the flames game tonight, so that's great. I will be here serving Jesus as I always do, Sunday nights, and going home to watch the replay later. So there we go.
Speaker 1:I I joked. I said it's been a long time since we've had to compete with the flames on a Sunday night in the playoffs, but it's nice to be able to have to do that once in a while. So last week, we came out of the Easter season, and we spent some time one week talking together about our vision as community. What is our unique perspective and opportunity within the larger community of Christian churches here in the city? And we are pretty light on specifics because we are still coming to terms with what God has been doing here and the huge influx of people that we've had and how we wanna respond to that, but we were big on the broad strokes of who we wanna be.
Speaker 1:Because we feel that there is a unique need, a gap in the city for communities that work really hard to bring together spiritual passion and intellectual engagement. And one of the ways that I know that we know our voice as a community is that the biggest compliment I get is also the biggest criticism I get about our church. And it goes like this, the teaching sounds like a lecture. And either people are really excited about that, and they come and they say, I love it here because when I come, I know that there'll be research put in, and regardless of who's teaching, there's been thought that's invested in the message. Or people will come and say, I don't get it.
Speaker 1:It's boring. It sounds like I'm in school. And that is completely fair either way. I totally get it. We are a pretty thought heavy community here, but that is only certainly one way to approach faith.
Speaker 1:I think the basics of Christianity are simple enough as Jesus says for a child, and yet the learning and the studying and the growing, that takes a lifetime. And so that's where we've sort of embedded ourselves in the voice and where we're heading. We wanna be intellectually engaged, but at the same time, I think we know that we need to be spiritually passionate. A community that ingests ideas and philosophy and history, but somehow isn't drawn deeper into an encounter with the living Christ, that might as well just be a lecture or just be a school. Because we're not a theology department here, and we're not a history department.
Speaker 1:We are a church, which is a unique expression of Christ's body enlivened by the spirit working to live out faith in our particular perspective and community. And so the other piece of language that I introduced last week that is becoming really important to me as we move forward is this, that we wanna strive to be a community that looks like Jesus so that we can serve a God who looks like Jesus and prepare ourselves to participate in a kingdom that looks like Jesus. Because that is for me the foundational proclamation of the gospel, that the fullness of the divine resides in the Christ. Not in religion, not in Christianity, not in church, not even in the Bible. It's Jesus that is the word of the perfect image of the divine in human history.
Speaker 1:And so that is what we orient ourselves around as a church, and we study the Bible with everything that our minds will give us. We participate in religion with the life of the spirit behind us. We attempt to be the church in a world that is guided and shaped by God. But we do that with Jesus himself as the gauge against all of our work and thought and action and effort is measured. And that is as generic as it sounds to talk about that in church, it is an incredibly radical posture if we're serious about it.
Speaker 1:Because as much as we wanna tame Jesus from time to time, he is an incredibly radical figure to orient ourselves around. And so that's what we wanna do, especially as we head into our second year as a community here at Commons Church. Now this week, we want to get ourselves back on track with the rhythm of the Christian calendar, and we find ourselves coming out of the season of Easter and into a season that is known as Eastertide. And this is the season that leads up to Pentecost and the gift of the spirit. But it's also the season where traditionally the church celebrates resurrection.
Speaker 1:And I know we just did that. Right? We just had resurrection Sunday. But traditionally, the church figured one day, one Sunday was not going to be enough to celebrate this story. We need an entire season to do it.
Speaker 1:And so today and for the next five weeks, we're gonna spend our time directly in the words of Jesus exploring what is commonly known as the Lord's Prayer. And since we are looking at prayer in this series, and since this is the point after I do my introduction where I would normally pause to pray in the message, I thought that perhaps we could do that together. And so I'm gonna ask you to stand with me, and we are going to recite the Lord's Prayer together. Now just in case you can't quite remember it, most of it is in the back of your head, but not all of it there. I have it on the screen here behind me.
Speaker 1:So this then is how you should pray. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Speaker 1:For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Excellent. You may have a seat. Now we're actually going to pray this prayer together every week for the next five Sundays, but my hope is that as we go through this series and even after this series is done, you may actually end up finding something meaningful in this ritual and this prayer.
Speaker 1:And so maybe you will choose to continue to say it daily for the next five weeks, maybe weekly after we finish this series as well. But I would encourage you just to try that, especially even in this series to see how that could impact you. But as we begin to take a look at this prayer, the Lord's Prayer, as we just recited it is taken primarily from Matthew chapter six. And there is another slightly shorter version of the same prayer in the Gospel of Luke, and we will look at both of those versions over the course of this series. But if you look it up, if you go to Matthew six in your Bible, you will notice that the very iconic closing doxology that we just said is not there.
Speaker 1:For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Very likely, depending on the Bible you're reading, you're not gonna find that. And that is unless you happen to be reading the sixteen eleven authorized King James version of the Bible. Now the reason for that is this, that as beautiful as those closing words are, which is why we generally still use them when we read the prayer together, they are simply not part of the original Greek manuscript.
Speaker 1:And there are quite a few of these small little changes that have cropped up in the Bible since sixteen eleven and the King James was authorized. Because most of our common Greek biblical manuscripts are something we call the majority texts, and they are Byzantine texts that go back to about the fifth century of the common era. We call them majority because they account for the majority, 80% of our ancient manuscripts, and they are the only actual complete manuscripts of the New Testament we have. But what they have is also a lot of little additions made throughout the text. Sometimes notes in the margins, sometimes comments on what we're reading, and sometimes helpful little closing lines to wrap up prayers in nice ways.
Speaker 1:Now over time, what has happened is that we have also found little fragments of much older textual traditions. Generally, these come out of the city of Alexandria, and these go all the way back to the second century of the common era. So we are talking about writings from the one hundreds, which is incredible when you think about it, that we have manuscripts and fragments of the biblical text that go down back to the year January to February. And so new scholarship and newer English translations have tended to work off the oldest, most ancient manuscripts or fragments we have of the New Testament text. And so that's why translations like the NIV or the ESV, when you read Matthew six, won't have that closing doxology attached to the words of Jesus because they're just not there in the oldest copies that we have.
Speaker 1:Somebody added them. Now they're still very beautiful, and that's why we still say them, and it's nice to do that collectively. But if you're wondering why it's not in your bible, there you go. Now with that in mind, let's actually turn our attention to Matthew. And I wanna back up a little bit, to Matthew chapter six starting in verse five.
Speaker 1:This is what we read. When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues or on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly, I tell you, for they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
Speaker 1:And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. This then is how you should pray. So the words of Jesus. Now couple things before we go back to the prayer that Jesus actually gives us.
Speaker 1:The first is this, I find it oddly ironic that just after Jesus has told us that when we pray, we should go to our homes, go into our rooms, close our doors, and pray in secret. We would take the ensuing prayer he gives us and turn it into a public prayer. Now don't get me wrong. I love saying the Lord's prayer in worship. I like when we collectively read it.
Speaker 1:I love when we get together and we say that in front of each other, but it is still a little bit ironic that we would take a prayer that he just told us, when you pray, go and do it by yourself. We would gather in church and say it together. Anyway, I find that ironic. Don't you think? And also, by the way, I feel like Alanis Moriss ette has made it, mandatory in Canada that when you say anything is ironic, you have to end with don't you think.
Speaker 1:Anyway, still a little bit strange. It does, however, illustrate one of the points I think Jesus is trying to make. Action and intent need to be aligned when it comes to prayer in our lives. I was in Starbucks this week. I know I was slumming it.
Speaker 1:No third wave coffee for me. Instead, it was mediocre burnt beans and mechanically frothed milk for the win. But I was standing in line, and the gentleman in front of me tried to pay for his coffee using a $50 bill as normal human being might try to do. But as I'm sure you're aware, here in Canada, we have largely forgotten what money looks like or that it is in fact legal tender. And so the person looked at this bill behind the counter as if it was completely foreign to him.
Speaker 1:Actually refused to touch it. He was like, woah, hold on. I can't $50 bill. We don't do this here. And so he let the customer know that like many stores these days, this Starbucks was unwilling to accept his plastic money.
Speaker 1:Instead, he offered that he could use his plastic credit card instead. They would only take bills under $20. Unfortunately, this guy in the line didn't have a credit card with him, only had a $50 bill. So the cashier said, listen. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have to go get my manager because I'm not allowed to accept anything over a 20. You can imagine Starbucks, it's in the morning. There's a line of people waiting. I'm like, oh my goodness. I'm waiting behind this guy.
Speaker 1:I just wanna get my mediocre coffee and go, continue with my day. And so before the cashier goes away, I jump in. I say, listen. Don't worry about it. Just add tall blonde cup of coffee to stay, and I will pay for it.
Speaker 1:I got the Starbucks app on my phone. It doesn't even feel like real money anyway. It's fine. I've got this one. So all of a sudden, this customer, the guy in front of me, starts acting as if I've just offered him my kidney or something.
Speaker 1:He's like, oh my goodness. You can't do this. The cashier starts making a big deal of saying everyone to everyone in line what I've just done, like I'm mother Teresa for buying his coffee. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm just trying to buy a coffee. Chill out.
Speaker 1:Now, here's what I found out when I went to scan my phone. The first customer had not just ordered a cup of coffee, he also had ordered some ridiculously overpriced reheated black bean quinoa wrap and a croissant for his friend. So my $2 gesture ended up being $17.32. But here's the thing, I wasn't trying to be nice at all. I just didn't want to wait for the manager to come and hold some public lecture on the veiled risks of counterfeit bills in Canada.
Speaker 1:I was just in a hurry. Now I promise I got my full reward in that moment. And maybe God even gave me a bit of a jab for trying to make my impatience look like generosity by costing me $20. But this is, in a lot of ways, exactly the framework Jesus is trying to set us against when it comes to prayer. How do we pull ourselves out of the experience into free flowing generative conversation with our creator?
Speaker 1:How do we take that and put it into alignment with a practice and a discipline of prayer that orients us in a healthy, holistic, humble direction of conversation? How do we pray in a way that connects us to God, not to some perceived image of who we want people to think we are? In other words, how do we make our intent when it comes to prayer line up with the experience of prayer that comes out on the other side? And the first thing that Jesus tells us about prayer is that prayer takes preparation. Now that may or may not seem odd to you.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I have come to accept in my life is that I don't sleep well. It has ebbs and flows, but generally, I struggle to sleep through a night. It's not because my son cries. He barely wakes me up. I just wake up on my own anyway.
Speaker 1:And so one of the things that I have learned, one of the only things I've learned that materially helps me sleep is spending time preparing to sleep. If I spend twenty, thirty minutes slowing myself down, deliberately turning off my iPad and setting it aside, focusing my mind on rest and sleep, and meditating for a time before I go to bed, I sleep significantly better. I know this is true. I just have a mind that has a hard time shutting down, and so I need to unspool at night. The problem is I don't feel like I should have to do that.
Speaker 1:When I'm tired, I don't want to meditate. I want to go to bed. When I'm sleepy, I don't want to focus on rest. I want to get under the sheets. I just wanna sleep.
Speaker 1:But for me, for whatever reason, preparing to sleep well takes work. Can I suggest that for Jesus, sometimes prayer to do it well requires some work? This is what he says. When you pray, go into your room, close your door, and pray to your father who is unseen. So for Jesus, there is actually intent and action that happens long before you go to say anything to God.
Speaker 1:Go into your room. Choose a physical space that's conducive to prayer. Close your door. Prepare that space in a way that leads you, and it focuses you on where you wanna go. And then pray to your father who is unseen.
Speaker 1:Think about who it is that you're speaking to, who it is you're talking to, you're talking to this God. Do that before you open your mouth. Now that's not to say that you can't just call out to God whenever you want to, whenever you need to, whenever the spirit moves you. Of course, you can. In fact, you should do that.
Speaker 1:But there are times where Jesus suggests that to pray well, our prayer should flow naturally out as the culmination of deliberate steps we take in order to make it as meaningful as possible, that we put work in beforehand, that we prepare ourselves. At the same time though, it's interesting here that for Jesus, prayer doesn't take skill. One of the things that was as evident in the time of Jesus as it is today is that certain people just have a way with words. Some of us like to speak publicly. Some of us don't.
Speaker 1:Right? The old Seinfeld joke was that more people said they were afraid of public speaking than death, so most people would rather be in the cascade than delivering the eulogy at a funeral. Right? Perhaps. But it is certainly true that some of us, public speakers are not, have a way of crafting beauty and poetry pulling movement and energy out of thin air using nothing but words.
Speaker 1:That's a gift. Evan, who was leading worship today, when he read his poem on Good Friday, I listened and I was moved to the point of tears, almost, not quite. If you missed it, you need to go on our YouTube channel and listen to it. Was beautiful. Jesus, however, says that when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans because they think they will be heard because of their many words.
Speaker 1:Now the Greek words Matthew uses here are and meaningless words and populous words. That's what that means. But we have to understand that when Jesus says this, he says this in the context of a life in which according to Matthew 14, he also spends entire evenings, entire nights in prayer. Now presumably, when Jesus prays for a night, he spends a lot of that time listening. But given that he prays all night, my guess is if you totaled it all up, it would be populous words.
Speaker 1:So the key here for me in understanding what Jesus is getting at is the range of different pagan practices that related to prayer and the gathering of God's attention. Everything from special incantations, secret arrangements of words that were meant to invoke the power of the gods, special prayers. Two, actions, ways of self mutilation, people who would cut themselves, injure themselves in order to prove their worthiness and force the hands of the gods. And all of that seems very distant, very ancient, very pagan to us, but all of these practices have found their way into Christian traditions as well. Now every time you see one of these Christian books that takes a prayer from the Bible, pulls it out of context, and turns it into some kind of formula for prayer, a a prayer that God must respond to.
Speaker 1:That's what Jesus is talking about. Every time we talk about asceticism in Christianity, the practice of punishing oneself, for example, fasting to the point, for the point of pain. This is what Jesus is talking about. Ways in which we think we can force God to listening to us by praying in a certain way or doing a certain thing or using certain words. Jesus says that's not what it's about.
Speaker 1:Prayer takes work. It takes preparation, but prayer doesn't take some special secret skill. It is not the uniquely gifted or those who have special technique that grasp prayer in a way the rest of us don't. You see, the Lord's prayer, as we have it, is a deeply democratizing practice because it takes prayer away from the professionals, and it gives it back to the church, to all of us. And, yeah, there will always be those who have a way with words, and they can take what we're collectively feeling.
Speaker 1:They can make that resonate back to us. And the church is gifted to have those people, to leverage those people, to unleash their talent on the rest of us. But the heart of prayer as Jesus shapes it is not defined by the profound beauty of the skilled that speak to the heavens. It is grounded in the mundane experience of the ordinary person muttering simple request to God under their breath in a quiet corner. That's where prayer is grounded for Jesus.
Speaker 1:Not the skilled, not the talented, not do those who have a special way with words, but the simple act of preparing yourself, focusing yourself, quieting yourself down, and speaking to God. And that may not sound incredible, but it is. Because when Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, what he says is that the act of speaking to creator of the universe has been completely and utterly democratized across creation. It is available to anyone, no longer the priests and the priestesses. Now that gifted among us may still speak on our behalf when we gather in church, and that is beautiful in its own way.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to the actual purposeful communing with the divine, that experience is equally accessible to everyone. Now perhaps you've had a moment, and someone stepped in front of you in a stage, in a church like this, and they prayed. And the words that they chose expressed something deep and unspoken inside of you. And it was as if as you listen to something unlocked, some emotion, some hurt, some healing that you could not previously articulate, and it was beautiful for you. Can I suggest that what Jesus is saying is that as good and moving and important as those moments are, a grounded experience of prayer reminds us that it is the same spirit at work in that moment as it is when you go into your room and you close your door and you begin to speak to God?
Speaker 1:The same spirit who is present and active when you sit silently in the midst of your own turmoil and your faith or your own doubt and your trust, or your own struggle to articulate what is going on inside of you, and yet you know there is confidence that God is listening. Because this is what prayer is. In the quote from Robert Farah Kapon on the quote reel, prayer is speaking to someone who is already speaking to you. And so finally, after preparing ourselves to enter into conversation with our creator and after setting aside the idea that we must somehow earn God's attention with our eloquence or our volume, now we come to what Jesus actually tells us about the practice of prayer. And so we have five weeks actually now four weeks and about five minutes here, to spend our time walking through the actual prayer that Jesus gives us and asking some questions about what it might mean if we applied it to our lives.
Speaker 1:Because here's the thing, the Lord's Prayer is actually quite simple. As it's recorded in Matthew, it is about 50 words long. In Luke, it's even less, about 30 words. But depending on how you break it down, there are actually only a few distinct things that the prayer focuses us us in on. I would break them down this way.
Speaker 1:How do I live with God at the center of my world? Our father who art heaven. How do I close the gap between heaven and earth? Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How can I trust what I need for today, not tomorrow, not a year from now, but right now?
Speaker 1:How do I trust God? Give us this day our daily bread. What am I holding on to in my life that I need to let go of? Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And then finally, where do I need to say no in my life?
Speaker 1:Lead me not into temptation. And so this is our outline for today and for the next four weeks. How do I live with God at the center of my world? How do I close the gap between heaven and earth? How do I trust for what I need right now?
Speaker 1:What am I holding on to that I need to let go of? And where do I need to learn to say no? And the first one is actually what we've been talking about all along already. Prayer is not about you. It's not about how eloquent you are.
Speaker 1:It's not about how celebrated you are. It is about a purposeful engagement with God at the center of the world. But it's also, I would suggest, exactly where Jesus starts his prayer. Because even before he hits the content, the meat of the prayer, he introduces it with statement. This then is how you should pray.
Speaker 1:And even at that, if we're being honest here, we've probably got to admit we haven't taken him all that seriously. I mean, truthfully, how many of us regularly say prayers that sound even remotely like what Jesus gives us? Some of us, no doubt, some of us are probably here in the habit of reciting the Lord's prayer, but I'll admit I don't, at least not all that regularly. And yet when we look at the Greek language that's used in both Matthew and Luke when they introduce things, it's slightly different, but it drives us in the same direction. Matthew says, which is something like pray in this way, therefore.
Speaker 1:Luke says this, which would be something like this, whenever you pray, recite this. In other words, for both gospel writers, especially for Luke though, this actually doesn't seem to be an example of a good prayer as much as a model prayer. Something to be repeated, something to be recited, something to guide us as we pray. In other words, it takes prayer away from us as the center of creative expression and places our focus squarely on language that God has given to us. He's gifted to us.
Speaker 1:Prayer is a gift. Now, again, don't hear me saying that prayer should always be stiff and stifling that there is no room for you in prayer. Remember, we just said that prayer is not a secret recipe to conjure God. But what I'm suggesting is that perhaps the simple act of starting to pray with language that comes not from you, but from God can help you fix your focus back where it needs to be. Now I don't know about you.
Speaker 1:I talk for a living. Maybe you don't. But I start in the morning, and I talk most of the day. Whether it's here with the staff or coffee with you throughout the week, whether it is muttering into my computer screen as I craft the language for sermons, I do that. It's a little weird.
Speaker 1:It's fine, though. I talk all day long, almost every day, almost every word that passes through my lips on every given day crosses that threshold though because I thought it, and I chose it, and I spoke it. Now sometimes I don't even think it, but that's a whole other problem. But in prayer, I have the opportunity to speak words that I did not choose and to express thoughts that I did not think for myself, to use language that I may not have brought to the surface on my own. And so for someone who makes a living speaking, it is a deeply centering and focusing act to recite words that are not mine because it puts God forcibly in the center for me as I offer God's words back to him.
Speaker 1:Because the very first thing that I say when I recite the Lord's prayer is this, our father. For someone who speaks for a living and focuses on what I want to say all the time to start with our father is important. It's not my father. It's not my dad. It's not my God.
Speaker 1:It is our God. Our father. Father. And in fact, in some traditions, the Lord's prayer is actually known as the our father prayer. In Greek, father of ours is the stiff translation.
Speaker 1:Translation. In the Kadish, a Jewish prayer that dates back to the time of Jesus and on which many scholars think Jesus is modeling his prayer. The Kadish begins with the line, exalted and hallowed be his great name. And yet in Jesus, when he prays, his great name becomes our father. And what he does in that one moment is both enlarge humanity and appropriately diminish any single one us.
Speaker 1:Because in the opening of this prayer, humanity is now wrapped up in the name of God. God is known as our father. He is no longer some distant, exalted creator, some powerful deity, some creative force in the universe. He is not primarily his strength or might or beauty or glory for Jesus because all of those attributes, all that is hallowed and worshiped about God is expressed for Jesus in God's role as loving father. Perhaps we could say this, that God is not really God without a son and children.
Speaker 1:That's who he is. He's a father. And that's why we say we worship a God who looks like Jesus because we can't fully see God until we see the son who reveals the father to us. And now Jesus reminds us that his father, as he prays, has become our father as we're wrapped up in his story. That's who God is.
Speaker 1:That humanity is wrapped up in the identity, the love, the creative impulse of the one who would sacrifice everything he has so that we would know him this way. But here's the key. The Lord's prayer forces me. It reminds me to acknowledge that this is not just about me. God loving me, God sacrificing everything for me, God inviting me into his story.
Speaker 1:Now sure, it is about me, but it's also about you, and it's about our neighbors, it's about our families, it is about them, whoever they are in our world. He is our father, and so he is their father as well. It's a prayer that brings us back to God at the center of the world because it challenges our individualistic, narcissistic, personalized, on demand, self serve, microwavable world to see just how deeply connected to everyone else we are. Last week, I talked about how at Commons, we are special in the way that every church is special, which is really to say we're not all that special at all. The our father here reminds us that we are special in a profound and beautiful way possible, but we are special in a way that every single living, breathing image of the divine has and always been special.
Speaker 1:My father is your father, is their father, is our father. And both of these ideas, our specialness, and our inherent connection to all creation are incredibly important for us as we pray. When we pray, we are reminded that you are special and you are loved. You are invited and welcomed by a father who would lay down anything to see you sit at his table. But in that, you are invited to a table that is big enough and wide enough and open enough for every them to be invited as well.
Speaker 1:And so this is how the Lord's prayer forms us and shapes us and starts us even as we utter the first simple words of what Jesus taught. Because praying in this way with these specific words, with this specific pattern of prayer, it reminds us in fact, I would suggest it forces us to ground our experience of prayer in the acknowledgment that we are not the center of the world. We are simply the beloved children of the one who draws all goodness to himself. And so when you pray, say this. Repeat this with me.
Speaker 1:Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.
Speaker 1:Amen. Now that's our closing prayer And for the next four weeks, we are going to continue to work our way through this prayer, learning, directly from how Jesus teaches us. But I wanna invite you, maybe not to make this the exclusive prayer that you say for the next five weeks, but to challenge you to begin your prayer this way as you pray over the next few weeks and days and see how that doesn't affect you. But we'll end with this as we always do. Love God, love people, tell the story, and join us next week.
Speaker 1:Jess is actually gonna be here teaching us, and we are gonna talk about how we close the gap between heaven and earth and how prayer is part of that. Have a great week. We'll see you next Sunday. Thanks, everyone.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.