Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.

Thanks for being here. So lovely to have some of you sitting here in the room with us, and of course, of you tuning in via livestream today. My name's Scott. I'm part of our team here at Commons. And as we're getting going today, I wanna bring you in on a little important routine I've had for the past couple of years as things have been frequently changing and shifting in our community.

This is a routine where I try to choose to pause and be grateful from time to time for the faces of old and new acquaintances gathered with distance and care here in the room because masks don't hide the joy and the affection that we bring with us to church, which is so lovely. Thanks for sharing that. Also, I'm grateful for the names and the faces or the names of old and new acquaintances that pop up in our live chat gathered with care and distance there because your presence brings encouragement and comfort with all of your weekly hellos and your emoji waves. And for the ways that new and old technologies and the creativity that they inspire in our community, these things stretch across format and restriction and the lives that each of us live to form and transform the pathways of our community. And I'm so grateful for how the ways that we are doing distance now, the ways that you are reaching with us across the gaps that we feel and whatever ways that we can, these have a way of pulling and binding us together, and they are actually shaping our shared future.

So thank you for this. Because today, we are emerging back into this conversation we are having to start the year about relearning friendship. And one of the things that we know in a community this size is that a conversation like this lands in a lot of different places. And this is why we are exploring ideas of identity and boundaries and our search for connection because we trust that they will find you wherever you happen to be today. In this moment, maybe it's a moment where friendships feel like they are different for so many of us.

Maybe you're sorting through some of yours, or dealing with loss and disorientation in this part of your life, or perhaps this is a season in which you have found new people as things have changed in your life, and these next few weeks are just gonna confirm and encourage you in the amazing work you're already doing. Whatever the case, we likely all benefit from a little friendship check-in and maintenance. Right? Last week, we started out with this meditation on Jesus' need for friendship. How despite all of the divine intuition and wisdom that Jesus seemed to have had in the world, he wasn't above a good meal and crippling belly laugh with his friends.

And this is what makes the characters of Lazarus and his two sisters so intriguing in the gospels. The ways that their lives entwined with Jesus' to the degree that some of Christ's most visible emotion soaks through layers of historical text and dust to remind us that there is something divine about the bonds of friendship. Because it was these friends of Jesus. He was willing to change his schedule for them just like you are willing to do for your friends. And it was these friends that Jesus was desperate to see, desperate to just be with when things went sideways for him just like it is for you.

Because perhaps it was Jesus' friends that taught him the truth of resurrection. The truth of heart, body, and soul made right in life shared well. And that is a compelling reason, I hope, not just to revisit last week's teaching if you missed it, but also to stay in this conversation with us over the next few weeks. Because today, we're gonna talk about loneliness, about what we share, about seeds, about rewondering and availability. And as we get ready to do that today, I wanna take a moment to offer a blessing, a bit of a prayer from our prayer book.

We still have a few copies of it laying around here in the building if you want one of those. This is a lovely offering entitled For Friends Who Feel. It's written by our youth pastor, Larissa. So I invite you to join me now. Let us pray.

And as we do, as faces come to mind, just hold them gently. Loving God, for my friends who feel alone in a room full of people, who've been unable to call somewhere home for so long, who know that you are there but haven't felt near to you for even longer. Remind them that you are father, mother, friend, and helper, and that you never leave their side. For my friends who are at a crossroads, unsure which path is theirs, they're walking around with a burden of grief and loss, Friends who are in cycles of restless nights and exhausting days, bring them peace and comfort today in a moment that assures them that they are safe, worthy, and loved. Amen.

Thank you for joining us in that. Alright. So, in 2010, my wife and I moved across the country for the third time. We left the West Coast life that we still miss, where side note, I probably sat in the same library as my Commons colleagues, Bobby and Yelena, without ever meeting them five or so years before we would connect here in Calgary. Pretty cool, right?

So we left Vancouver, and we moved back to Southern Ontario where I began doctoral studies, and we left warm winters and great seafood for sure, but we also left some really good support systems. My wife Darlene left a really fulfilling season of her career. I left a great department at the University of British Columbia, and we left a small organic faith community that we had been helping to start. And that first year back out east was crazy. We had moved to a city where we literally knew two people, and we had found a new church community close to our home, but it was literally a thousand times bigger than the one that we had left.

And we welcomed our third child in less than five years. And I often say that if you look at photos of that period, Darlene and I don't look very healthy in them. And how could we? Because we apparently were never sleeping. We were just surviving.

And I was having a really hard time. About eight months in, the pressure was starting to amp up. I was pulling all nighters to keep up with family and stay productive professionally, and it was during one of those nights that I hit a bit of a wall. I couldn't concentrate on my work, and I couldn't sleep. I found myself laying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and I couldn't pull my brain out of this spiral that I was in, because I was sure that I was gonna mess up the most immediate project, and I was sure that that failure was going to have me kicked out of the academy, and all I could think about is how we were going to end up on the street.

None of which was true, as you might imagine. But perhaps you've been in a similar place where the things you tell yourself ring more true than reality. And the reality was that I would receive support from some unexpected places, which is a story for another time. The truth is is that these really dark moments that I went through sparked some serious introspection that revealed, among other things, that I was lonely. I was living in a home with my partner and my kids, but I felt like I was flying solo.

I was pursuing an incredibly awesome professional opportunity, finding my way, developing some connections, but I was feeling super isolated. And I was going to a church that presumably gathered lots of friendly people, but I was floundering. And I knew that if I spent another year like this, it was gonna be catastrophic. I was learning something that specialists have identified for some time now, that transitions and changes and traumas in our lives often play a significant role in sparking and sustaining our experiences of loneliness. And this can be a move or a career shift.

It can be a death or an illness. It can be someone else leaving, someone else making a big choice, someone else changing in our life. And I was starting to see how in our cross country move, I'd lost contact with almost all of my meaningful friendships. Author Catherine May talks about moments like this in our lives where we fall through or pass through the gaps and the mesh of our everyday world, and we fall into somewhere else where everyone else carries on. Everybody else is normal, and you're the only one there with this storm cloud hanging over your head, a cloud of sadness or paranoia, a sense that somehow you've uniquely failed, looking around as everyone continues without you.

And I know that rings true for some of us because I know my experience isn't unique. I mean, who hasn't lost contact with a friend during this pandemic season? The good ones, yes, some of us have lost those, but what about those people we didn't know super well, but they made us laugh? And we like bumping into them, and their presence was this gentle reminder that we are part of something. And who hasn't felt the shame of not being able to keep up with the rhythms of connection?

Who hasn't felt singled out and alone when a valued friend or community changed and shifted in ways we didn't anticipate these past couple years? I've started to think that if we're gonna consider relearning friendship, we probably need to start from a place of assuming that our feelings of loneliness aren't the exception, that your experience of isolation isn't just your own. No. It's what you share with everyone you meet. Because we have all gone through this massive global change together.

This change is rewriting social patterns and values institutions. It's changing how we interact, how we connect, and why we want to. And we are all navigating these feelings of distance and neglect and involuntary solitude together because we've all passed into somewhere else. And our passage here demands that we take a moment and we offer a kind reminder, this is our shared address now. Today is.

And no one has to figure this out on their own. And that is such a significant shift in perspective that can help us when we think we're on our own. But in the rest of our time today, I wanna lean towards some practical steps that the scriptures hint at for this friendship work that we're relearning. And to do this, I wanna look briefly at the apostle Paul, and specifically his correspondence with the Philippians. But before we get to that, I understand that some of you who have read lots of Paul or heard lots about him might be thinking, Paul?

Really? I doubt he had any friends. And that's an understandable assumption given how Paul's writing does come off as insecure and closed minded and bullying from time to time. Also, we see places like Acts nine that he has this habit of fiercely debating everybody. Acts thirteen and fifteen hint at the story of how he could not get along with his coworkers.

And when you read his letters, if you're not familiar with them, if you go and read them, it's not hard to imagine him tossing around a little name calling and poorly veiled sarcasm from time to time. Okay? So maybe he wasn't the best of friends or at least not always. But one of the things that we observed last week with the gospel stories about Jesus is how friendships seem to lie just outside our peripheral vision as a reader. Jesus is often seen as we read teaching his disciples, but we don't see him joking with them, and we shouldn't assume that that absence means that friendships weren't happening, and so too with Paul.

I mean, the book of Acts regularly skips over parts of the story. Years pass between verses at times, such as how in Acts 19, we learn that Paul spoke in the Ephesians synagogue for a while, for about three months, and when he didn't connect with the audience, he just took his friends and went somewhere else in the city for two years. Two years that we learned nothing about, but we should assume formed the basis of meaningful friendships. No? Well, I wanna suggest that we should think that those two years meant something because in the next chapter, we learn that at some point, Paul had left Ephesus.

But now he's on his way to Jerusalem, way in the East, and this is a journey that he senses will be his last. And so he stops briefly in the vicinity of Ephesus, and we read that the Ephesian leaders of the church travel the 70 kilometers or roughly about four days to get to Paul. And there, Paul says goodbye to them. And the text says that they all wept as they embraced and they kissed him. And what grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again, which is a picture of how clearly at some point, for all of his bombastic writing and exacting leadership, Paul learned how to cultivate deep sincere connections through trial and error and across distance, all his letter writing.

And these friendships formed even when we don't see how or when. And this is a guidepost for us that sometimes relearning might require some unlearning. Letting go of our use of harsh words, letting go of interpersonal skills that don't serve us well, letting go of our heavy demands on others to plant new seeds of friendship that always grow in time. Now to say that about Paul, I wanna say this. Biblical scholars unanimously point to Paul's letter to the Philippians as a place where Paul's affection for and investment in others is undeniable.

Paul was writing to these friends from prison, and he's facing an uncertain future. And he wanted his friends to know how much their support of him mattered to him. And there are numerous instances where Paul declares his love and appreciation for the community, such as in the opening verses where Paul says this. He says, I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

And I don't know if you can see it, but right there are the hints of a practice that can help us in our experience of loneliness, I think. And here's how. See, clinicians and scholars that study loneliness in the twenty first century, they point to the ways that urbanization and suburbanization have created individualized and alienated societies. This has shaped many of our lives deeply. But these scholars also point to the secularizing, demythologizing influences of the modern scientific revolution.

And what do I mean what do I mean by that? Well, I mean that religion and its historical communities have been removed from the center of social networks. And with this shift over the last hundred years or so, many ritual practices that provided structure and meaning to life have been lost. We also see this in how medicine and psychology, they've certainly helped us understand our bodies and our minds while also removing our sense of soulfulness, our sense of connection to spiritual and divine presence, leading many to navigate what author Faye Baum Alberti calls the pinch points of loneliness. Those places in our life that get tight.

We navigate them without the supports and ideas that helped people in previous generations. And what I see in Paul's opening lines here is a practice that might help in this. A practice of friendship as remembering each other, where our remembering rewonders the world. And you might be asking yourself, Re, what? What are you talking about, Scott?

Well, I think about I want you to think about how often someone comes to your mind. How sometimes randomly you'll think of someone you know or you knew or you love. It's curious how that happens. Right? I want you to think about how when you flip through pictures and profiles on your phone, you don't just read and observe.

You actually remember some of these people. And I wonder, do you ever assume that others are doing that for you? There's a little wonder in that. No? And I wonder what it would look like if, like Paul, we cultivated a practice of gratitude when this happens.

To daily be mindful of the divine presence you see and experience in these people that skirt and accompany your life, or maybe they used to. And couldn't that practice infuse those relationships with a new awareness of God's kindness and nearness and offer a healing tonic for your loneliness some days? Wouldn't it fill some of your world with wonder again, especially as you express that gratitude to someone? In waves or hellos or in actually handwritten letters and stamps or in dropped off cookies or flowers sent or in comments written or posted from far away in new clubs or local ventures joined or started. All of these things transforming a world that can feel so hostile and meaningless and inhospitable through the divine mystery and simple ritual of friendship.

Now right at the end of this letter, Paul is getting ready to sign off. And he's given all of his instructions, and he's declared his love for his friends. And then he writes this. He says, I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.

And I'm not saying this because I'm in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. And most scholars believe that Paul's friends in Philippi had sent some kind of support, some money perhaps, but likely a person or two to help him while he was in prison. And it's interesting because he's being grateful here and he's also revealing a helpful practice for dealing with times when we're alone and seemingly without companionship. The practice of adapting our expectations. And why would we need to do that?

Well, neuroscientists and psychologists contend that most of us experience loneliness based on the combination of three factors. Our level of vulnerability to social disconnection, and we experience this differently as individuals. Our ability to self regulate our emotions that are sparked by those kinds of isolation, again, different people do that in different ways. And the third way is that is this experience of our expectations of and about other people. There's a couple of scholars who have argued that when loneliness takes hold, the ways that we see ourselves and others, along with the kinds of responses we expect from them, these things are heavily influenced by our feelings of unhappiness and threat.

In other words, we might experience someone as rejecting our attempts at friendship simply because we've been rejected before. Or we may not realize that we're projecting our social needs onto people who are just more introverted than we are or onto people who have very different experiences of gender or social class or ethnic background. And we may not account for how the person that we wanna get to know is going through a significant personal challenge and isn't emotionally available in the ways that they might want to. And the list could go on because our expectations get out of hand so easily sometimes. And for some of us, this leads to more intense disconnection.

Now what studies show is that the characteristic most common among those who rate themselves as being low in loneliness, The most common characteristic of these people is a full availability to whatever genuine social interaction is appropriate to the moments that they find. Or said another way, the clearer and healthier our expectations of others are, the less lonely we're likely to feel. We're less likely to let slowly returned messages disrupt our emotions. We're more likely to encourage those we encounter and give them the benefit of the doubt when they aren't super friendly or aren't able to give us the connection we feel we need. We're more likely to forgive when others are simply human.

And these are practices rooted in what Paul says to his friends. When he offers gratitude for the ways that they've communicated, that they care, and he's also tailored his expectations of their friendship to the fact that he's been in prison hundreds of miles from them. He doesn't assume the worst in their absence and lack of contact but fights for contentment even though he's alone. And for sure, we know that there are times when others will willfully reject us. They might be cruel in sidestepping our attempts at connection, or they might take advantage or ghost us, and this does break our hearts.

These people are not our friends, and we should adjust our expectations in kind. But how many times in the past couple of years have you assumed the worst of someone who's just overworked and tired? Someone managing illness, mental health, and all kinds of personal and professional turmoil? And how often have we been discouraged when it turns out that that lovely person doesn't seem to have time for us? Or let that past discouragements we've experienced keep us from the positive, receptive moments that are lying ahead of us today or tomorrow.

Because if we follow Paul's example, it seems that at least in part our journey into and through our loneliness just might help us in all our relearning, honoring the holy need for connection that we all share, trusting that we can get better at friendship, we can get better at rewandering in life and discovering connection, not when we force it, but in being available to who people are and how they change and staying open for when they step toward us. All of us living in a world that might be shifting, and it's so full of distance, and it's beyond our control, but it's a world made right and made more whole and more beautiful because we share it. Pray with me now. Loving God, we ask, would you take these thoughts and these words now and bind your grace to them? For our hearts that might be aching, for our hearts that might be weary from reaching toward other people, searching for connection.

For those who might be tired here today and are just struggling to take care of themselves, We all need friendship. We need its levity. We need its care. We need its transformative power, which is why in the season where so much has changed and will continue to change, we ask, guide us as we relearn how to care and invest, as we learn again to greet and friend each other with divine wonder, honoring longtime friends, staying open for the new ones, and adjusting our expectations with care. Holy Spirit, be with us now.

Bring comfort and courage that we might need. We pray. Amen.