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Habit - Mark 10
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
You do not need good theology to get into heaven. You do not need extravagant displays of generosity to be saved. You need to be open to knowing yourself as God knows you and then trusting that you actually are as deeply loved as God tells you. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
Speaker 1:We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome this weekend. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. We don't take that for granted, especially on Father's Day.
Speaker 1:My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here, and if you are a dad in the room, then we really want to extend a special thanks to you. Hopefully, you got some popcorn and took a bit of a superhero selfie because we love you and we really do want you to know that. However, at the same time, we also recognize that in a community this size with this many services, father can also be a complex word with a lot of emotions attached to it. And sometimes the joy of celebrating dad is mixed with the memory of the fact that he is not with us.
Speaker 1:He's gone and there's a gap. For some of us, the thought of celebrating someone who's been absent to us is difficult. And then of course for some, there are deep wounds that feel like they are opened up again on these types of days, and we wanna create space for all of that with us. Now for myself, I am deeply thankful for the father who shaped much of who I am as a man, but in the light of all the stories collected here in community, I don't take that gift lightly. And so my prayer is that in whatever way you have experienced Father in your life, you may come to experience the deep and abiding love that was intended when Christianity appropriated the language of Father to speak of God.
Speaker 1:May your experience of God today begin to heal memories that are hard. May your experience of the divine today bring life back into memories that are full of joy. May your experience of the divine continue to enliven and transform and make whole your experience of love this day. Now, even as we celebrate dads, we also turn our attention to a new series today because we are in that time of the year where hopefully we're slowing down to enjoy the coming weather, and you are likely looking forward to taking perhaps a bit of a break from some of your normal rhythms. And our hope is that we can begin to use that opportunity to reflect on some of our deeply ingrained habits and maybe even begin to create some new healthy patterns for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And so today, we wanna talk about the primacy of patterns and how they deeply shape us even when we don't realize it. And then over the next couple of weeks, I want to begin to look at a couple specific habits and patterns within the Christian story and how they connect us to our faith. But I actually wanna start today with the very construct and the idea of habits and patterns because I love a good habit. Now anyone who knows me knows this is not surprising. I am that guy that wears the exact same outfit every day after all.
Speaker 1:But when I find something that works for me, and it fits in my life, and it brings me joy, then that is all I ever want to do again. Wear the same clothes every day. I walk the same four kilometer loop twice a day, every day with my dog. I wake up, and I come to work in the morning, and I make the same espresso in the same way in the same cup every single day. And if I could, I would take the exact same summer vacation every year.
Speaker 1:I would just hang out at Folk Fest for four days, and I would be happy and ready to go back to work after that. Now, I will grant that at times I can get in a rut. There was a period where I ate the same homemade breakfast burrito every day for breakfast literally for about eight months. I would make them in bulk and I would freeze them. I would eat one every day.
Speaker 1:It was fantastic. And then one day, halfway through a burrito, I just could not swallow. I kept chewing and chewing. I just I couldn't do it anymore. That was it.
Speaker 1:And that was after literally hundreds of the same burrito. Now I changed my recipe. I tweaked it. I'm back. It's all good now.
Speaker 1:But in the most part, I just love patterns and habits and rhythms and consistency in my life. And far from being monotonous, part of what really works for me is all the creativity it gives me. And I know that might sound strange, but I work in a career where I basically have to be creative on demand every week. I write about 40 sermons a year, and I love that part of my job. But I realized years ago that waiting for inspiration to strike was just not gonna work over the long term.
Speaker 1:And so I started paying a lot of attention to my natural rhythms. I started taking notes on what was working for me and what wasn't, and I started scheduling the most productive patterns I found into my week. So every Wednesday, I write a 5,000 word draft of my sermon, whether it's good or not. Every Thursday, I let it sit and I don't think about it. Every Friday, I come back and I rework the whole thing.
Speaker 1:And then every Saturday morning, I get up and I cut it down to 4,200 words for Sunday. Now still, some sermons are bad and some are hard and some are easy and some weeks I do get to sit back and listen and some of the other voices on our team teach me. But what I found over the years is that my habits are actually far more important than I once realized. A good habit will always beat a stroke of genius over the long term. And so you may be saying to yourself, well, that's nice, and maybe if I ever have to write a sermon, I'll come back and listen to you then, but beyond that, you're kind of wasting my time.
Speaker 1:But what I wanna suggest is that paying attention to our habits and our rhythms is more important than we realize. Not only for what they tell us about ourselves, but for who they help us become over time. So you may not write sermons, and you may not walk dogs, and you certainly may not be interested in wearing the same shirt every day, but the idea of finding the habits that help you become you, This is something that each of us could stand to explore, even if your habits are a little bit more flexible than mine. So today, we're gonna talk about coming and going, eternal life, the root of faith, and the real reflection of what we really trust. First, let's pray, and as we do that, today is Trinity Sunday.
Speaker 1:Last week was Pentecost, and Pentecost is what moves us from Eastertide into ordinary time, this new normal of the spirit in us. The first Sunday of this new period of ordinary time is known as Trinity Sunday. It's the point in the year we remind ourselves of the essential communal mystery that sits at the center of the universe. And so today as we pray, we rest together in the mystery of this triune God. Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, lover, beloved love, mother, child, womb.
Speaker 1:Three in one and one in three, mystery of relationship from which all creation springs. Might we, in this moment, come face to face with the truth of intrinsic interdependence which comes from you. Might we see you in each other. Might we see you in everyone. Might we recognize you in our being together today.
Speaker 1:And as we do, might we be moved to love as you love, to shape our patterns and habits as yours, and to find beauty in the mystery that transcends all of our language. May we know ourselves as perfectly loved today, and may that knowledge become the narrative that invites us forward into you always. In the strong name of the father as he protects us, the spirit as she nurtures us, the son as they walk with us, we pray. Amen. K.
Speaker 1:I wanna start today by reading a passage from the gospel of Mark, and it comes to us from chapter 10. It starts in verse 17. However, before we get there, I wanna back up to notice the section that leads up to it. Because there, Jesus has been meeting with a bunch of children. So these kids come to him.
Speaker 1:They wanna see him. And his disciples think that they are his bouncers, and they decide that they are gonna try to shoo these children away. But Jesus says, let them come to me. Do not hinder them. Truly, I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom like a child will never get it.
Speaker 1:And why that's important is because Jesus is about to have someone walk away from him in the next story. And I think the writer here has positioned these two tales together for a purpose. To remind us that Jesus is always open, always welcome, always ready for us to come to him or return to him if we need to, but that this is always our choice. So whether it is children who want to come to Jesus or a rich young ruler who wants to walk away, choice and consent and our movement in our time toward and even away from the divine, this is sacred for Jesus. The fact that Jesus would be irate over someone getting in your way toward him, but then in the very next story, allow you to walk away if you need to.
Speaker 1:I think this is actually meant to remind us of the depth of God's grace. That Jesus is ready for you whenever you are ready for him. And so, as Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. Good teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Now we're gonna keep reading here, but we need to pause for a moment because we need to deconstruct a little bit of this language.
Speaker 1:We have talked about this before, but this phrase, how do I inherit eternal life, does not mean how do I get to heaven? You'll come across the phrase eternal life a few times in the New Testament, probably less than you think though. In Mark and in Matthew, this story is actually the only time eternal life ever appears. In Luke, it appears one other time. Although to be fair, the author of John uses that phrase a lot.
Speaker 1:But Zoan Aionion did not refer to life after death. It was more like life everlasting or the life of the ages or maybe even the life intended by life itself. And the word is eternal, but it isn't just a temporal word. In fact, wasn't primarily quantitative, it was qualitative. And so the quality of life that makes it life is that it lives, and that's what's eternal about it.
Speaker 1:So there's actually a very strong argument to be made that Ionios, whenever it is used with the word zoe or life, absolutely does imply a life that never ends. But the idea here and the question here has very little to do with our modern concepts of going to heaven. What this man is asking for is the life that he was meant for. How do I become alive fully and completely here and now and forever? And Jesus responds, why do you call me good?
Speaker 1:No one is good except God alone. And I mean, that's kind of a strange response. Learn to take a compliment, Jesus. But this actually comes from the Jewish culture of the time and the conviction that God alone was the source of all that was good in the universe. So Jesus is not saying that he's not good.
Speaker 1:He's reminding this man that his goodness comes from a good God. There's a record of a rabbi around this time who records hearing God in a dream and God says to him, good greetings to the good teacher from the good Lord who of his goodness does good for his people. So it's not that we're not good. It's that God is the only one who names us as good. That might not seem like a big deal, except that sometimes what I see is this idea that Jesus is nice, but God is just.
Speaker 1:As if those ideas could ever be separated from each other. I think it's really important to remember that what we see in Jesus is exactly what we should expect to see in God. There is no good cop, bad cop. There is no bait and switch here. The Christ is the only exact representation of the divine.
Speaker 1:And if your image of God is less good than Jesus, That is a theological problem. But he continues here. He says, you know the commandments. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery.
Speaker 1:You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony. You shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother. And the man responds, teacher, all of these I have kept since I was a little child.
Speaker 1:And Jesus says, dude, I am impressed. Actually, he doesn't say that. What he does is he looks at him and he loves him. Now, I love this moment in the story. Jesus is about to say some pretty hard words here.
Speaker 1:Words that he knows are gonna be hard to swallow. Words that he possibly intuits already are going to force this man to walk away. And yet he does that from this very deep place of compassion and love. I mean, how many times have you got to call someone out on one of their blind spots? Or you had the chance to take them to task for their shortcomings, and you just reveled in that moment.
Speaker 1:It's okay. We've all been there. That is not the attitude that Jesus carries with him into these moments. Don't get me wrong. Jesus defends those who are mistreated.
Speaker 1:Jesus has no problem calling us out on our worst moments when he needs to. But cancel culture is not really Jesus' thing. And if you get called on the carpet, it's because God is good and Jesus loves you. That's the motivation for these things. And so he says to him, listen, one thing you still lack.
Speaker 1:Go, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me. At this, the man's face fell, and he went away sad because he had great wealth. And Jesus looked around and said to the disciples, how hard is it for the rich to enter the kingdom of God? Now this is perhaps one of those passages that you have heard before.
Speaker 1:It's pretty famous one, and it's the setup to a very famous line from Jesus. He turns to his disciples and he says, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Now, for the record, and this is just for free, the Greek word there is camel, but the Hebrew word for camel is almost exactly a homophone for the Aramaic word for rope. And so just like we saw last week, it is likely that Jesus is speaking Aramaic. Someone hears rope, but they think camel.
Speaker 1:They write it down. That gets carried over into English and then translated as camel for us. Now that doesn't really change much, does it? The idea is still exactly the same. A rope is not going through the eye of a needle, but it does make the metaphor at least a little more coherent.
Speaker 1:Probably what Jesus is saying is it's easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. However, that's for free because there's some really intriguing stuff going on in this dialogue between Jesus and this young man. First off, we have already determined that the concept of eternal life that we are discussing is not simply some future moment after death where one gets to live again. You know, this is about life that lives. Life that cannot be stopped and life that does what life does, but it's also about life that starts right now.
Speaker 1:And yet even with that, Jesus' answer here is pretty stunning depending on the type of Christian background we come from. Jesus says, sell what you have, give it to the poor, come and follow me, and you will find what you're looking for. And for some of us, that's a little bit scandalous, isn't it? I mean, we are in a Protestant church today. We're part of the tradition of the Reformation which goes back to the sixteenth century, and we stand in that long line of Christian thought that says that we are saved not by works but by faith.
Speaker 1:And yet here is Jesus intimating that a few granted very large works can pardon the pun by your way into heaven. There was an uproar a few years ago when a very famous Twitter pastor boldly proclaimed that Jesus did not preach the gospel. Jesus could not preach the gospel because until Jesus died, there was no good news for anyone. Now, that probably would have been a shock to Jesus who when he first appears on the scene introduces himself by saying, the spirit of the Lord is on me because I am anointed to proclaim good news. Sent to proclaim freedom for the prisoner, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Speaker 1:But how do we balance this clear invitation of Jesus that this young man can find his salvation in his choices? That clear declaration that Jesus has come to proclaim tangible, workable, touchable good news in the world with our conviction that no one ever earns their way into God's good grace, That no one ever finds the life they were meant for by trying harder, and that everything is a gift of God. Anything less than grace is at best alright news. And if you're waiting for me to get back to habits, well, here we go. Because I think that Jesus is getting at something much deeper here than just our manufactured dichotomy between faith and works.
Speaker 1:See, I think instead, he is doing something really interesting, and he's doing a really good job at reaching behind our constructs to point us to all of the ways that our habits and our unconscious choices in the world reflect what we trust most deeply in the world. And some of this comes from how we use some of these words in English. Martin Luther, and by the way, that is two Martin Luther references in two weeks, so take that Lutherans. But he really keys in on Paul's message in the New Testament, is layered through all of his letters, but comes through very clearly in Ephesians chapter two. There he writes, for it is by grace that you've been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves.
Speaker 1:It is the gift of God so that not by works no one can boast. That's for the most part a pretty clear, really beautiful encapsulation of this New Testament ethic, that you do nothing but receive, that you earn nothing but are loved, that you have nothing to offer the divine, and yet you are welcomed and embraced and transformed and changed by grace. And we have talked about this many times before, but it's a foundational piece for us here at Commons, this conviction that trying harder doesn't change you. Being told to be better won't help you. Having your sins held up in front of you won't do anything to make you a better person.
Speaker 1:Because at some very deep level, all of the brokenness in all of our lives, all of the things that we already know are unhealthy and toxic and tearing at us from the inside, These are just symptoms. Sins are simply byproducts of the fact that we don't know ourselves as God knows us. We don't know ourselves as loved. We don't know ourselves as welcomed. We don't know ourselves as embraced and safe.
Speaker 1:And because of that, our actions betray all of that insecurity. So let's say for an example, oh, I don't know. You are a very rich person, and you have far more than you need, and yet you continually find yourself wanting to gather more and more and more to yourself. And that's because somewhere deep inside, you know that no one else is gonna look after you. No one's gonna look out for you.
Speaker 1:No one else is going to be there for you in your moment of need. That's all on you. And maybe you really are a good person, and you honor the law, and you respect your parents, and you give to the needy from time to time, but your habits betray what you really believe about your world. You are not safe. Now what might happen if you came to know yourself as Jesus knows you?
Speaker 1:See, I don't think you would feel bad for being rich. I don't think you'd be embarrassed for being greedy. I just think that slowly over time, you'd begin to let go of all that. And see, what I've come to realize in myself is that the more I learn to trust in what God tells me about me, then the best, the most healthy, the most generous, the most loving, the most vulnerable parts of myself begin to come to the surface. And the worst, the most greedy, the most closed off and insecure parts of myself that I work really hard to hide from everyone, those actually begin to fade.
Speaker 1:Because here's the secret, when you know yourself the way that God knows you as infinitely valued and profoundly loved, as always cared for and welcomed back home. Then your habits begin to reflect what you trust most deeply. That is what is so complex about a word like faith. See, the Greek word that Paul uses over and over again, including the passage we read from Ephesians two is pistis or faith. But the problem is at various times, we use faith or belief or trust to translate that into English for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And all of those can be appropriate. They're all good, but they all tend to have slightly different meanings for us. Faith tends to be something spiritual. Belief tends to be something intellectual. Trust tends to be something relational.
Speaker 1:The beauty of a word like pistis is that it includes all of that. I think this is probably precisely why Paul is so fascinated by this word, why it's so important to him. But the problem is we tend to hear one or the other or the other depending on our perspective. So for some of us, pistis really means faith, and that means something spiritual. And that means that grace is the gift that comes through your religious participation or through some ecstatic spiritual encounter.
Speaker 1:For others, pistis really means belief, and that means grace comes through intellectual assent. Grace is the gift that comes through believing the right things in the right way, comes through knowing your doctrine and being able to articulate it clearly. And pistis is a big word. It has room for all of that. It includes all of that.
Speaker 1:But the primary definition of pistis is actually this, the state of being where someone places their full confidence in the faithfulness of another. And so, of course, if you place your confidence in someone, eventually, you're gonna believe things about that someone. And if you place your confidence in a divine someone, you're certainly going to feel some kind of spiritual encounter at some point. But the root concept of pistis that allows it to blossom and flower and push its way into every area of our lives is actually all about trust. It is trusting that Jesus is going to look after you.
Speaker 1:It's confidence that God actually loves you. It's dependence on the fact that the divine has you. That's what Paul is talking about. That's what Luther stumbled upon. It's not about pitting what we do against what we believe.
Speaker 1:It's about grounding ourselves in who we really trust. And so now take that and go back and look again at Jesus' interaction with this rich young ruler. Because if Jesus wants to preach the gospel, the good news that God loves you and all you ever need to do is sink into that, then what is the most important question he can ask this man in this moment? Is it, do you believe that I am a hypostatic union of the divine and human in time and space? Is it, do you believe that I can come back from the dead if I want to?
Speaker 1:Is it, do you believe that one day some people will write some things about me and understanding those things exactly in the right way, that will determine your life eternal? Or is the most important, the most poignant, the most direct question Jesus can ask. What do you really trust most in the world? Because that's what he asks. See, people are right absolutely when they say that Jesus is making a very specific challenge to a specific person here, and that not everyone is called to give everything to the poor.
Speaker 1:That's true. But at the same time, Jesus is much asking every single one of us what we trust most deeply. Because here's the thing, it's your trust that welcomes you into this life God imagines for you, but it's your habits that betray where your trust really lies. And this is why Jesus can say, sell your possessions and you will find eternal life. It's why Paul can say, it's not by works but faith you are saved.
Speaker 1:It's why James can say, faith without works is worthless and dead, and they can all do it in the same New Testament and still be coherent. Because none of it was ever about attention between what you think and what you do. It was always about who you choose to trust. You do not need good theology to get into heaven. You do not need extravagant displays of generosity to be saved.
Speaker 1:You need to be open to knowing yourself as God knows you and then trusting that you actually are as deeply loved as God tells you. And that will shape everything about you. See, here's the thing. Every one of us, all of us, we can think one thing and we can do another. I do it all the time, so do you.
Speaker 1:It's okay. But our habits, our unconscious patterns and rhythms, our intuitive response to the world around us, our unspoken instinct to gather and defend and protect ourselves at all costs. This will always speak to what we trust most deeply in the world. And that's what Jesus is reaching for here. It's not right thinking.
Speaker 1:It's not right doing. It's a progressively deeper, more rooted, more foundational experience of trust that sits at the most elemental parts of every one of our souls. A life grounded in the confidence that God has you. May you begin to know yourself as God knows you this day. May you have confidence that you are as deeply loved as Jesus tells you right now in this moment.
Speaker 1:May your most tightly held unspoken habits and unconscious rhythms begin to reflect that profound trust and confidence. May God's faithfulness to you be all that you need this day. Let's pray. God, as we begin this conversation of habits and we look to examine our unconscious rhythms, our instinct, our intuition about the world, might we recognize that more than just what we think, more than just what we do, it is our deep profound trust that you have us that grounds us and centers us and from which all of our choices flow. God, might we know ourselves as you know us, as deeply loved and always welcomed, And may that become the narrative through which we live and move and think in this world.
Speaker 1:May your grace infect us and push into every area of us so that we are transformed into the people you imagine us to be. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.