Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Part 1
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Well, hello. Welcome here, everyone. If we haven't met, my name is Bobbie, and I am one of the pastors here at Commons. Preaching sermons is a longtime love of mine, so thank you for letting me do that in your home, or cranked up in your car, or on a walk with you around your neighborhood. These continue to be strange days, but here we are still finding so many ways to connect.
Speaker 2:Today, we begin a new series called Reframing Our Rituals. Now, let's talk about the series title for a minute. First, reframing. In writing, a narrator frames a story. Remember Alec Baldwin narrating introductions for us in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums?
Speaker 2:Royal had lived in the Lindbergh Palace Hotel for twenty two years. No one in his family had spoken to him in three years. Ritchie had retired from professional tennis at 26. For the past year, he had been traveling alone. Margo was married I am still going here.
Speaker 2:Margo was married to the writer and neurologist, Raleigh St. Clair. She was known for her extreme secrecy. As the characters are framed in narration, we see that the story has meaning. Sure.
Speaker 2:This is who Royal and Richie and Margo are. But who are they to each other? And more, who are they to you? So if we take this idea of framing, what might it mean to reframe ritual? Well, it's return.
Speaker 2:Maybe even a refresh to the patterns, practices, and prayers that frame our lives. Next, this pronoun our reframing our. I was out for a walk last week with someone who described their relationship with Lent rituals as a whole smorgasbord of practices borrowed from different traditions. And I think many of us can relate. Practices of our devotion come from the past.
Speaker 2:We shape them in the present to fit our lives, and they will be something different in the future. That's what it means to share them. The Christian tradition is ours. In all its variety and strange history, it belongs to us all. Seeker, sinner, saint, all are welcome to Christian ritual.
Speaker 2:Now, that final word ritual in the series title, I really like the definition from design consultants, Kersat Ozenc and Margaret Hagen, and they draw out the distinction between ritual and routine. It's basic, but it's so good. This is what they write: Rituals can have routine qualities, but rituals are not routines. A ritual is an intentional act. It needs you to be present and committed when it's happening.
Speaker 2:Routines, on the other hand, are automated and often only get recognized when they're broken. Recently, I took a moment to map out my own rituals, and I encourage you to do that too. I mean, who doesn't love a mind map? On one side of the page, I made a capital R, and on the other side of the page, a lowercase r. And the big R are the larger than life rituals I return to.
Speaker 2:And the small r are the everyday rituals I'm committed to, but I wouldn't say lowercase rituals are any less meaningful to me. My big R rituals, the Eucharist, marriage ceremony, my ordination vows, and small R rituals: pajama pants yoga every morning writing in my journals and lights off bath to process my emotions. Whether big R or small, ritual is our conscious participation in our own transformation. If you are a lover of outlines or take notes in your journal, today's outline is this. It's pretty simple.
Speaker 2:Part one, ancient words. Part two, hard times. Part three, glorious creatures. And part four, prayer as solidarity. But before we dive in, I want us to take a moment to pray.
Speaker 2:And today, you will see me cross myself as a nod to a prayer ritual I actually grew up with. So let us pray. Loving God, you see us and know us and love us. You are near to us and gentle with us and delighted in us. And it can be hard to live with those holy hopes in the middle of life with real struggle.
Speaker 2:But today, will you meet each one of us in a fresh way with the joy of Christ's presence so near in our ritual and reflection and most assuredly in hard times. Spirit draw us to new learning and find us attentive to learning from each other. Amen. The text we're in today and all series long is the funky little letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews is written like a sermon, and it sits near the back of your New Testament.
Speaker 2:In Hebrews two, the author, whom we actually know very little about, though it could even be a woman, true story, the author writes this: It is not to angels that God has subjected the world to come about which we are speaking, but there is a place where someone has testified. And here, the author quotes Psalm eight: What is mankind that you are mindful of them? A son of man that you care for him. You made them a little lower than angels. You crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.
Speaker 2:In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. It's Hebrews two:five-eight. Now Hebrews is always doing one thing. It's a continuous argument making the same point over and over again. And the point is this: Jesus is better.
Speaker 2:Jesus is better than angels. Jesus is better than Moses. Jesus is better than that old way of being a priest. Jesus is better than ancient words on a page. And that may sound a little hype man to us, but it's not a diss on angels, on Moses, on ancient words.
Speaker 2:It's just about where the story of God went next. And the Greek word for this kind of argument is syncresis. It's the argument of comparison. And one scholar summarizes syncresis in chapter one and two like this: The mediation of Christ is better than the mediation of angels or Anything angels can do, Jesus can do better. So what's that to us?
Speaker 2:Well, take a look at the section of Psalm eight quoted in these verses: You have put everything under their feet. You being God, they're being humans. God has put everything under our feet. It's always been true. The creation poem portrayed it.
Speaker 2:David the psalmist sung about it. But all that everything is hard to grasp or at least hard to hold on to. That everything we need could already be ours right there under our own feet. This letter is written to people who struggle. Who struggle to know who they are when their neighbors hate them, when their rulers don't protect them, when they are caught between changing religions Judaism ancient and good Christianity birthed into the world and still learning to walk.
Speaker 2:And even as they grow figuring out what following the resurrected Jesus looks like, they turn to ancient words to guide them. They dust them off. They look again. They see wisdom under their feet. You see, wisdom is not easily left behind.
Speaker 2:She, as the scriptures often personify, helps us find true meaning in very old things. Lately, I've been experiencing ancient words brought back to life in a pretty cool way. Every Tuesday night, I set an early alarm. At 06:15 on Wednesday morning, I rise when it is still so dark. I drink some water.
Speaker 2:I boil the kettle. I do my morning pajama yoga. I'm telling you it's a thing. And then at 07:00 I find the prayer liturgy for the day and common prayer for ordinary radicals. I check the reading.
Speaker 2:It's often so much the same liturgy that begins, Oh Lord, let my soul rise up to meet you as the day rises to meet the sun. There are always two passages of scripture, one from the Hebrew Bible, one from the early Christian church. There are prayers for others and the Lord's prayer and a benediction that ends like this. May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you. At 07:10, I open up a Zoom call.
Speaker 2:I wait for my, like, about eight to 12 friends, always a few different faces on the screen. And at 07:15 sharp, we divide up our parts. Then we readmumble them together in the awkward beauty that is Zoom and we pray. And let me tell you, I've been a reader of scripture almost all of my life and it's been so long since I felt the words come alive like they do on that stupid little laptop screen with a handful of others. Then at 07:30, when we wrap up the liturgy, we take a moment to mention a word or phrase that we carry with us into the day.
Speaker 2:And that that is my favorite part. Hearing you interpret scripture and hold hope and cry for change in our broken and beautiful world. Nothing is more alive to me than that. And then we end the call until next week when we do it all over again. Ancient words hold living wisdom and often the best way to shake that wisdom loose again is to hear the voices of others speak their truth.
Speaker 2:But I get it. And so does the author of Hebrews. It can be so hard to hold on to a fresh take especially in tough times. At the end of chapter eight the writer says, From where we are right now, we do not see everything right under our feet. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than angels for a little while.
Speaker 2:But now, this same Jesus is crowned with glory and honor because he suffered and died. By the grace of God, Jesus tasted death for everyone. Verse nine. And tucked up in these words is this little roadmap for hard times. And the map doesn't lead you around the painful parts or away from the stuff that hurts.
Speaker 2:It leads you through and with hard times. And some theological nerds call this map of transformation salvation history. And here in Hebrews, it looks like this. There's this ideal, right? People are God's ideal.
Speaker 2:The way we love and create like God, the way we have power and can share it with others. I mean, God loves that. But we don't always love like we should. We, as you well know, we destroy. We get stuck.
Speaker 2:We forget who we are. The story though, it doesn't end there. Look a little closer. See Jesus show up and show us how to be human like human in all the best ways and the divine effort to show us who we are reaches all the way to death. It's likely that the letter of Hebrews was written to second generation Christians.
Speaker 2:And in second generation Christianity, people wonder if following Jesus is really worth it. Is it worth being so different from your neighbors in a world where identity hinges on what others think and say? Is it worth resisting an empire that puts a target on your back? Is it worth getting together to pray and to sing when some of your own are dragged away and imprisoned for that reason? So these Greek speaking people who know the Hebrew scriptures well and love to think about life in big philosophical terms are starting to peel away from faith.
Speaker 2:And the writer says like, hold up, hear me out. Remember who you are. God has made you glorious and Jesus shows you how to match that glory in your humanity, from the heights of heaven to the depths of the grave. You can be confident in this. Crowns and crypts, both glory and death, are places Christ can be found.
Speaker 2:And I know hard times are here, they'll always be here. But whatever loss we face and pain we feel and mistreatment we experience Christ did too. The divine sunk as low as we will go to reverse our sinking and show us the pattern of all things that after dying we rise. Hebrews says grace tasted death for everyone. Or in the words of Reverend William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign, grace lifts from the bottom up.
Speaker 2:But like, how? How do you believe all that? Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you come very close to peeling away. Sometimes faith falls flat.
Speaker 2:But then some small message, some speck of beauty, some repeated ritual reminds you who you are at your very core. So you breathe another sacred breath. You say thank you and you keep going. The letter of Hebrews is a ritual practiced in hard times for people who felt like they were at the bottom and wondered if they could go on. The letter arrives and it is read out loud in their community and as the words ring out their heavy hearts feel surprisingly light.
Speaker 2:In hard times, you crave meaning. And we creatures have used rituals since we painted on cave walls to make sense of all the mystery and loss that we live with. There are so many kinds of rituals to help you through hard times. From a funeral that for just a split second brings the person you lost back into focus where you can be so glad you got to know them and love them. From that coffee date maybe happening over FaceTime now with that old friend who has seen you through so much.
Speaker 2:And every time you see their face on that screen, you know you are safe and you are listened to and you are loved. From the Eucharist meal, which we now share in our homes, I can't even believe it, this meal has traveled across space and time to meet us again and again in another unbelievable time in the story of faith. How inventive. How creative. How connected.
Speaker 2:That through it all, you are God's glorious creature. In the chapter, as it moves along, the writer says that Jesus chose to pioneer our salvation through suffering. And that word pioneer, the Greek is archegos, is one of our best English attempts to say origin of all that is. And that little title doesn't distance us from God. It draws us into the life of the divine so close.
Speaker 2:We are family. Verse 11. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them sisters and brothers. For the writer of Hebrews, Jesus's life is not bound to one time and place.
Speaker 2:In fact, Hebrews doesn't take us back to Jesus's manger. It doesn't rehash Jesus's miracles. It doesn't recount Jesus's sermons on hillsides. The writer has a mind fixed on divine presence more infinite. It's presence that goes where we go and lives where we live and moves as we move.
Speaker 2:As one scholar says, For Hebrews, the historical Jesus does not arrive around four BCE and depart thirty CE. The history of Jesus is from the beginning of creation to the transformation of time. Meaning the life of Jesus spreads out like an expanding universe and it never ceases to draw near to you, Jesus's sister to you Jesus's brother to them. All made holy stamped with sacredness. What if ritual puts you into moments where you can connect to the holiness Jesus gives you?
Speaker 2:What if prayer is just being open to your identity as a member of the ever expanding family of God? What if the simple things you do that bring you joy are just the beginning of all that God has for holy little you? And what if that would be not enough, but something growing into so much more? Now, what has been so hard about this pandemic is how our rituals are public facing, like relationship embracing, funeral and wedding celebrating rituals have been dormant. If you haven't felt quite like yourself, I mean, join the party.
Speaker 2:Either we are made for rituals or rituals make us. They are that important. When theologian David de Silva talks about the incarnation promoted by the writer of Hebrews, he points out how it challenges Western Christians. Practices. You don't stop being loved and holy and made in the image of God when life hurts and you don't shrink, you don't retreat, you don't shut down, you learn, you stay open, you transform priorities and practices.
Speaker 2:So let's take one more moment to talk about the ritual of prayer as solidarity. The final verse we look at today is a line from the prophet Isaiah quoted by the writer of Hebrews. It's the last part of verse 13 and again Jesus says, Here am I and the children God has given me. Now the writer reflects first century Hellenistic thinking about God. There's a divine hierarchy of being.
Speaker 2:God's on the top and angels are below God and humans are below angels. Easy peasy, right? You've probably picked up on that in your own Bible reading and maybe some of that Greek imagination, it lives in you too. God's far away and your prayers beg for God to be near and to change things down here and all around you is a godless space. But the writer borrows a brother sister parent metaphor and it helps us to see past hierarchy to mutuality.
Speaker 2:Jesus in solidarity with us. And recently, I thought more about solidarity in prayer through a conversation and experience with my friend Jess. Jess, who lives in California, sent me a voice message in early January and she was feeling stressed about going back to work as a teacher of kids with disabilities at a time when the pandemic has been raging in the Bay Area. In addition as an American Jess was stressed about the peaceful transfer of power in the presidency remember this was before the inauguration and as my friend who is like family to me let me in on her stress she asked if I could pray for her But I decided to take a walk instead. Jess said that she was heading out in her truck to find a bit of ocean on a cold California day to find some calm.
Speaker 2:And I texted back, I love the beach on a cold day. Get after it. And I said, in solidarity, I will take a winter walk to the closest body of water to me, a reservoir. So I bundled up and I walked from my front door to the Glenmore Reservoir here in Calgary. And somehow, though, I had forgotten how frozen over the reservoir would be, so when we exchanged water pictures, mine looked like a stretch of tundra.
Speaker 2:And just as were, I kid you not, views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Bay from Marin. I mean, like, what's the difference? Right? Now, I know taking a walk can be routine. Just something you do without thinking about it.
Speaker 2:But taking a walk can be ritual. It can be your whole prayer. If Jesus takes our hand and walks us to God, why wouldn't we do the same for each other? Like across 2,000 kilometers, I held the stress of my friend and we walked slash drove to the water's edge together. You have rituals that you care about, places that are portals for you to greater meaning.
Speaker 2:And rather than hear this sermon as a call for you to pray more or pray another way or pray without ceasing, I want you to look at the rituals you already love and see how they are your prayer. See your walk around the block with the sun on your skin as a prayer of yes to all of life and see the meal that you cook to feed the bellies in your family as a prayer of graced provision and see the bath that you take when your heart is breaking as a prayer of comfort and peace. See knitting and napping and running and writing and singing and sportsing and cooking and stretching and feasting and fasting as your prayer. You know Jesus holds your hand in all of it, right? And what about our capital R rituals receiving the Eucharist together watching a friend get baptized you and me and hundreds of our friends in a room on Sunday singing about God's love.
Speaker 2:Well those rituals those rituals will be our praise. Please join me in prayer. Loving God, we take a moment to consider our rituals those capital R rituals those lowercase r rituals all the places and our days and nights where we just slow down a little where we perform an act that is holy that is stamped with the sacred. Christ you are born to us in those moments and in our struggle we know we are not alone. May we sense spirit in the details of our lives this week love that surrounds simplicity that calms wisdom alive and renewed in our rituals.
Speaker 2:Living God present with us now enter the places of ritual from breaking bread to washing bodies to reading sacred texts and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.