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Habit - John 20
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
It is God that loves you. It's the divine that forgives you, but it is the very voice of the spirit embodied in another human being that speaks that truth to you. Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. My name is Jeremy, and we're really glad that you're here with us. As we mentioned already today, this week was host to both National Indigenous Peoples' Day and World Refugee Day, and both of these are significant to us here at Commons. We continue to work with refugees from around the world. We posted some updates this week for the Alhador family, who we brought to Canada almost four years ago now.
Speaker 1:They are doing incredibly well, applying for Canadian citizenship right now, which is really exciting. But then, of course, we also have two additional families that arrived this past year, and we have an amazing team of volunteers who continue to care and work for and settle these families. We have posted a bit of highlights from each of their stories to our social media channels this week so that you can check up on that. We're gonna say thanks for all your continued support of these efforts. Also, we have our global partners here today.
Speaker 1:That is Hands at Work and IJM, International Justice Mission. And they do incredible work around the world all the time in other communities. So check-in with them. Stop by those booths if you haven't already. This week was also host to National Indigenous Peoples Day.
Speaker 1:And while we acknowledge our presence here on Treaty 7 lands, we also want to ensure that as a community, we are listening to and learning from indigenous voices. In Calgary, we are blessed with a lot of opportunities to do that. But I also wanna point you to a couple resources here at the church, rescuing the gospel from the cowboys by Richard Twiss, Shalom and the Community of Creation and Indigenous Vision by Randy Woodley, and Glory Happening, Finding the Divine in Everyday Places by Caitlin Curtis. These are all excellent books by indigenous authors that will deeply add to your faith journey, and we have multiple copies of each of these on the bookshelf, by the south entrance there. You're welcome to borrow one of those or read it.
Speaker 1:And, of course, you can always support the writers directly wherever fine books are sold. However, this week was also or will be also a critical moment in our denomination. A vote will be taken this week to determine whether the ECC will begin removing LGBTQ affirming churches from the denomination. And so we are sending Scott Wall and Joel Braun down to Omaha to represent us, to vote on our behalf, and make sure that we do what we can to ensure that a place for inclusive churches like Commons are preserved within the ECC. So please pray this week.
Speaker 1:We will have thank you. We will have an update as soon as possible when information comes back to us. Now last week, we began a new series, and this series is all about our habits. Today and next week, I wanna talk about some specific habits within the Christian tradition, but last week was all about the significance of habits themselves. How our rhythms and unconscious patterns often speak to what we trust most deeply in the world.
Speaker 1:And so it's often easy to say one thing and do another. But when it comes naturally to us, what flows out of us when we're not paying attention, this often speaks to where we really ground ourselves in the world. And this is really what I think Jesus is reaching towards in moments like his encounter with the rich young ruler that we looked at last week. Jesus says, sell your possessions, give them to the poor, follow me, and you will find eternal life. And I don't think that this is Jesus misunderstanding the gospel.
Speaker 1:I don't think this is Jesus arguing that good works can buy God's love. I think that this is Jesus working to uncover what we really trust most deeply. Do we trust ourselves? Do we trust our money and our abilities, our resources, and wealth, which is what we talked about in the last series, or do we, at the core of our being, trust that Jesus will do good for us? And this is really what sits at the root of the New Testament's concept of faith.
Speaker 1:We talked last week about the Greek word translated faith as in saved by faith. It's the word pistis, and that can be variously translated as faith or belief or trust, and all of those are completely valid. They all work. But they do have slightly different connotations. Faith sounds tends to sound like something spiritual.
Speaker 1:Belief often sounds like something intellectual. But the root definition of pistis is the condition in which one places their full confidence in the faithfulness of another. That's what faith is in the biblical sense. It's not your theology, although your theology is very important. It's not your religious practice, although religious practice is also important.
Speaker 1:Pistis is about who you trust to be faithful to you. And that is exactly what Jesus keeps asking over and over again in the gospels. Do you trust me? My premise last week was that we can often say one thing, and we can often do another, but our instincts, our intuitive habitual response to the world, this will always betray what we really trust, just like it does for this rich young ruler. Now, last week after the sermon, a few of us had a really interesting conversation about how our habits can betray our insecurities, but how they can also be used to shape and build our trust in new areas.
Speaker 1:And that's what we want to begin to talk about this week. Now, one more thing before we move on. I did take some time this week to put together a video expanding on some of the ideas from last Sunday. And so if you were intrigued by this idea of sin as a symptom of not knowing yourself as God knows you, and grace not only is what saves us, but what changes us, and how coming to know yourself the way that God knows you is absolutely loved and accepted. This creates a virtuous cycle within you that leads you up and away from your worst moments towards God.
Speaker 1:Then you can jump on YouTube after the sermon because I really do think that this is an important concept that we get somewhere deep inside. Shame over what you're not is not the gospel. The gospel is that you are loved. And grace is what tells you you don't need to be ashamed anymore. And the good news is that once you get that, and once that sinks somewhere deep inside you, it will literally slowly change everything about you.
Speaker 1:But today, we move to the habit of confession. First though, let's pray. God of grace, who speaks salvation, who offers redemption, who heals and repairs and knits back together all things. May your love come to define our perspective. Might it shape our worldview.
Speaker 1:Might it slowly, steadily, progressively, continually heal each one of us. For those of us who have heard about faith, but we have intellectualized it. For those of us who have been captured by faith, but we have turned it into religion, may we be reminded of trust, that our faith is in your faithfulness. We trust that you love us, that you have us, that you will do good for us. And as we turn our attention now to the habit of confession, right, we come to understand the beauty of speaking our truth, even those difficult bits we tend to hide.
Speaker 1:Not so that we might change your mind about us, but so that you might change us. Might our lives be healed, our communities changed. Might our world begin to reflect your grace. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Confession. And I will go first. I confess that this is one of those topics that probably does not get enough airtime in our churches. It's one of many areas that we have a lot to learn from our Catholic brothers brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1:And even if we have some different convictions when it comes to confession as a habit, the significance and the centrality and the commitment to a habit of confession, I think, is something that we could all learn from. However, I think sometimes for some of us, the closest that we get to confession is probably summed up in a mantra like this, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Last week, my son came into the room, and he approached me with this very serious look on his face. And I could tell that he was hiding something behind his back, and he gathered my attention. He said, dad, I need you to look at me.
Speaker 1:And he said solemnly, dad, if I want to play with scissors, it's very important that I ask you or mom so that you can make sure that I'm safe. And, also, can I play with these scissors as he brought them out from behind his back? And that's kind of the approach we have at times. Right? Now a quick Google search turned up a few articles.
Speaker 1:16 confessions that you know to be true if you love Game of Thrones. I don't know. 14 very real confessions about what it's like to live with overprotective parents. Who knows? 10 confessions your hairdresser will never tell you, and 17 shockingly honest confessions from people who work at Tim Hortons.
Speaker 1:Who knows what that's all about? But none of that has anything to do with what we're talking about today. Because what we're talking about is not where we do what we want and then we express acute mea culpa after the fact, or where we take some weird perverse pleasure in publicly shaming ourselves on the Internet. What we're talking about is this deep recognition of our most flawed moments and characteristics and how the naming of those moments is part of what stops them from becoming definitional for us. And this is really one of the pieces that I think we misunderstand, and it keeps us from confession as a regular habit.
Speaker 1:I think we imagine confession as wallowing in our worst when really confession is meant to invite us toward our best. But let's back up the train because we have a few things to talk about before we get there. And so today, we have confession and repentance, traditional differences, speaking forgiveness in the world, and being transformed by grace. But let's start by talking about some of our misconceptions because confession is not repentance. And I know that those are both big spiritual religious sounding words, but that doesn't mean they need to be scary because they're actually quite simple.
Speaker 1:Repentance is the practice of noticing one's mistakes and heading in a different direction. Confession is the art of talking about those mistakes with someone you trust in order to help make sure you head in that new direction. And there's a lot more that we can say about that. Don't leave yet. But we have to really understand the relationship between these two ideas before we begin.
Speaker 1:Confession is how we give voice to something happening within us. It's how we commit ourselves to the forgiveness that's offered to us, but confession is not. It's never how we buy our place in God's grace. That's not the point. And this is often one of the great misconceptions that Protestants have with the Catholic tradition.
Speaker 1:See, our Roman Catholic siblings do not believe that priests forgive sins. They do hold that confession to a priest is necessary, but it's not because priests decide who gets forgiven. That is only God, ever God. All Christians affirm that. What we do for each other in confession is we name that forgiveness for each other.
Speaker 1:And that is a really interesting idea, one that finds its roots in a very difficult passage. Near the end of the gospel of John, the resurrected Christ appears to his disciples, and he spends time with them, and he teaches them. And near the end of his time with them, we read Jesus say, peace be with you. As the father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that, he breathed on them and said, receive the holy spirit.
Speaker 1:If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven. But if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven. So that's John chapter 20 verses 21 to 23. And what on earth is going on here? I mean, is Jesus really saying that we get to decide who is forgiven?
Speaker 1:Well, yes and then no. You see, part of this is once again a translation issue. The words translated here forgive and not forgive are the Greek words ephemi and krateo. Ephemi means to release. Krateo means to hold on to.
Speaker 1:And knowing that, most scholars recognize this passage as a callback to an earlier passage in Matthew where Jesus commissions the same disciples in a very similar way. And he says, on two occasions, truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Now if you remember, we talked about this a few times over the last few weeks. But Jesus is likely speaking Aramaic and Hebrew in conversation.
Speaker 1:That is being translated into Greek by the gospel writers and then into English for us. Well, the idea of holding on to and releasing sounds very similar to the idea of binding and loosing. And it's possible that what's happening here is that these writers are simply translating the same phrase from Jesus in slightly different ways, or at the very least, that here in John, Jesus is expanding on and reinforcing his earlier commission from the gospel of Matthew. But if that's the case, then the key here becomes understanding that the language of binding and loosing comes to us from the rabbinic tradition. See, in the rabbinic tradition, all rabbis would bind and loose.
Speaker 1:And what that meant was there were 613 mitzvot in the Hebrew scriptures. There's 613 rules to follow that everyone agrees on, but each rabbi would have their own interpretation of exactly what those rules meant. So, for example, the rule is don't do any work on the Sabbath. Okay. Great.
Speaker 1:But what does that mean? What constitutes work exactly? You see, Judaism is very communal, very dialogical in nature. And so one rabbi might have a very strict interpretation. They might say, you cannot walk more than one kilometer on the Sabbath.
Speaker 1:Anything more than that is work, and it's out of bounds. But another rabbi might come along and see things differently, and they might say, well, listen. One kilometer, that's not very far. I mean, that's kind of restrictive. What if you wanna walk and see your mom that day?
Speaker 1:I mean, and she lives a kilometer and a half away. That's not work. That's joyful. And therefore, they might lose their disciples from that more strict interpretation, and they would bind their students to a new interpretation that said, hey, work is defined by what you experience along the way. And so if you're walking for the purpose of enjoyment and rest and family and friendship, if that journey brings you peace, then it is sacred for Sabbath.
Speaker 1:And by following a particular rabbi within the larger conversation of Judaism, you would be loosed from the teachings of one rabbi, and you would bind yourself to the teachings of another even as everyone is bound to the scriptures. And this is particularly important because Judaism had existed for a very long time. The rules had to survive through different eras, and the rules had to be constantly reinterpreted for new moments. For example, if you have a rule that says you have to make animal sacrifices, but only in the temple, and your temple gets destroyed, you're going to need to figure out what to do with those rules. Well, Jesus comes along and says to his disciples, you have bound yourself to my teachings.
Speaker 1:And now I am going and the spirit is coming and the spirit will be in you and through you, and so you will now need to learn how to bind and loose those who will follow me through you. In other words, this is Jesus saying that the community of Christ will need to continually interpret and reinterpret Jesus' teachings in new situations all the time if we want to be faithful to him. So hear this. Fidelity to Jesus involves binding and losing. It involves ongoing interpretation.
Speaker 1:It involves thinking for ourselves. This is literally Jesus telling us that proof texting is not going to work because you will need to constantly reinterpret my story in your time and your place if you want to be faithful. Now in John, that language gets pushed about as far as it possibly can. When Jesus says that we will actually either hold on to or release each other's sins. The key here, though, is understanding that this moment in John is predicated on the idea that we have already bound ourselves to the way of Jesus, which means this commission is dependent on the conviction that forgiveness is freely, extravagantly offered in Jesus.
Speaker 1:And so what most theologians would argue here is that this is Jesus inviting us not to decide who's forgiven and who's not, but to declare God's forgiveness in the world freely. You could think of it this way. If you bind yourself to my teachings and you speak forgiveness in the world, people will know themselves as forgiven. But if you lose yourself from me and you do not speak grace to the world, people will not know they are loved. And up until this point, Protestants and Catholics actually have basically the same understanding of this passage.
Speaker 1:We do not decide who is forgiven in the world. We declare the forgiveness of Christ to the world. The difference comes in understanding who Jesus is talking to here. Jesus says, peace be with you. I am sending you.
Speaker 1:If you forgive, if you do not forgive. And the question here is who is the you? Now Roman Catholics would say Peter or at least the disciples. Protestants would suggest it's much broader, and I happen to land on the latter in part because in Greek, they have what's called a second plural pronoun, a y'all if use will. And that's exactly what we're reading here.
Speaker 1:In fact, all of the yous in this passage are a y'all. And if you read the larger section, you'll see that here in the room, it's actually not just Peter. It's not just disciples. It's actually a fairly motley crew of early Jesus followers, including some dude named Cleopas, who we know nothing about, 11 of the original disciples, and, quote, unquote, all of those who were gathered with them. So I would argue that whatever authority Jesus is bestowing here, it does not appear to be just for the few.
Speaker 1:It appears to be for all of y'all. And the thing is, I really do mean that. Jesus is speaking to you. If you have bound yourself to the life of Jesus, if you've grounded yourself in the grace of the divine, it is now your sacred privilege to lose people from their sins. You get to remind people that forgiveness does not come through trying harder.
Speaker 1:It comes through the grace of God. As Peter himself will write, as you come to him, the living stone rejected by humans, but chosen by God and precious to him, you now also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood for God. In other words, there was once a priesthood that was required to speak God's forgiveness to the world, and there still is. And this is something that I'm intimately familiar with, that I become more and more aware of the longer that I occupy this type of a role. Because sometimes what you and I need most in the world is for someone to tell us to our face what we already know.
Speaker 1:This is where, as much as I am a Protestant by theology, I really do think we have missed some of the wisdom of our Catholic siblings. Because what the Catholic church knows is that priests don't forgive anyone. They speak the forgiveness of God to those of us who need to hear it. I like the way that George Raymond Beasley Murray puts it. He says, in the area of pastoral counseling, when dealing with sin and guilt, an authoritative word of forgiveness is sometimes required from a representative of the Lord of cross and resurrection.
Speaker 1:We churches have need to learn from one another. But the key here is that if you have bound yourself to the way of Jesus, you are now that authoritative word of forgiveness. And what he's getting at here is that forgiveness is not just some ontological category. It's not just something that happens in the mind of God. It's something that happens in you as you receive it.
Speaker 1:In a sense, you and I, everyone here, we are forgiven by Christ right now. But in another sense, in almost a just important sense, you are not forgiven until you know it somewhere deep inside. And what Beasley Murray is saying, what Christ is saying is that sometimes to know it, you need to hear it. And that's okay. That when you come and you confess with someone who has bound themselves to the way of Jesus and you hear you are loved, you are forgiven, you are accepted, you are welcome.
Speaker 1:It is God that loves you. It's the divine that forgives you, but it is the very voice of the spirit embodied in another human being that speaks that truth to you. And that's beautiful. And I can't tell you how many times I've met with someone who has been a Christian all of their life, and they know all of the answers. They know exactly how and why and what it means to be forgiven.
Speaker 1:All of their theology is perfect. And yet, when I sit with them, and I look them in the face, and I tell them that they are perfectly loved, that they are absolutely welcomed, that they are forgiven, it breaks something in them. Because forgiveness is more than something that happens in the mind of God. It's something that happens somewhere deep in us. It grounds us.
Speaker 1:It takes root in us, and it changes us when we know it. And it's okay that sometimes you need to hear that spoken to you. That does not mean you don't believe. It doesn't mean you don't have faith. It doesn't mean you don't trust.
Speaker 1:It means that you're human. Because confession is not a habit that changes anything in the mind of God. It's something that changes something in us. And I really do mean that. Now you see, we are social animals by nature as human beings, and we are hardwired evolutionarily to seek out not just our physical safety, but our social safety.
Speaker 1:In fact, one of the reasons that all of us love to ingroup and outgroup so viciously, one of the reasons that we have this innate drive to draw lines and put up boundaries to exclude outsiders, is because that's what makes us feel safe. You and I, if we can agree together that they are the problem, then that makes both of us feel more secure in our acceptance of each other. It's where the idea of a scapegoat comes from. It's why we blame other people so that we can rally together as community, but confession plays this incredibly subversive role within the concept of Christian community. Not only do we speak divine forgiveness to each other, but we actively undermine the power of a scapegoat over us every time we confess to each other.
Speaker 1:See, everything that you and I do is meant to secure our place in community. And the reason we need community is because we want to be safe, but feeling safe means we wanna let our guard down and be really known. Except that letting that guard down and being fully known that threatens our place in the community if we really let people see who we are, and that's what we're drawn to in the first place. And so what happens is it creates either this sense of cognitive dissonance in us. I'm part of community, but I can't really be present fully.
Speaker 1:Or it creates this latent anxiety in us. I'm worried about what's gonna happen if somebody really finds out who I am. And all of this drives us back even harder to look for more scapegoats we can point to, more people we can blame, more people we can exclude to protect our place in the community. But when we confess to each other, when we regularly and ritually name our truth, and we're honest about our story, and we refuse to allow our worst moments to define our place within the community. When we choose to believe that our worst moments will not disqualify us, and we are met with a community that affirms that divine voice to us, What happens is that we are met with everything we need in the midst of the very moment we are most terrified of.
Speaker 1:In other words, in confession, we are welcomed as an insider at the very moment we declare ourselves as an outsider. And in that, all of our attempts to defend or deflect or point our insecurities at someone else, to scapegoat someone, to draw boundaries and barriers, all of it becomes completely irrelevant for us. Because in confession, we acknowledge that what we imagined would separate us has somehow become what unites us together. All of a sudden, an act that started out as speaking what we already know to each other somehow becomes the item through which we are transformed by each other. And this is the real problem in Protestant circles when we sometimes start to believe that confession is just a private act between you and God.
Speaker 1:That's that. So don't misunderstand me, but when it stops there, when confession stops being an opportunity for us to speak God's forgiveness to each other in tangible ways, when confession stops being an opportunity for us to redefine community in new ways, when confession becomes individualized at the expense of the power of grace to unite us and bring us together. What happens is that we rob ourselves of everything this habit offers to us. You do not need a priest in your life. You do need those who abound themselves to the way of Jesus.
Speaker 1:Those who invite you to be fully known and transparent with them. Those who welcome you to imagine community in new ways, those who carry within their lungs the very breath that speaks divine forgiveness. Forgiveness that will help you become you in new ways. So may this be your charge today, that you begin to seek out safe persons and places where you can confess your sins and hear your forgiveness spoken back to you. That you would embody community defined by acceptance and welcome over boundaries and barriers.
Speaker 1:And that you would come to recognize the very breath in your lungs right now as infused with sacred possibility to speak healing and wholeness and forgiveness to those you encounter. When you do that, you will change everything for that person, but everything about how you define community as well. Let's pray. God, we confess that at times we have taken this incredible gift you have given us, and we have personalized it and individualized it and compartmentalized it away in such a way that it has lost its power for us. God, might we recognize that it's okay to need to hear our forgiveness spoken to us.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that we trust you less somehow. It just means that we're human, and we're social. And knowing that another embodies the way of Christ and speaks that acceptance to us is part of what it means to be human. And so may we look for that in safe and secure places with people who we trust to follow your way. But then, God, might we begin to understand that within our words, within our chest, within our breath, we carry sacred possibilities.
Speaker 1:To speak grace and forgiveness and acceptance and welcome to those who desperately need to hear it. And that when we do, this is more than just a kind word. It is the very spirit and grace of God speaking through us to the world. God, might we take that responsibility, that privilege seriously, and may we carry confession with us on our lips into every encounter. May it change everything about us as individuals.
Speaker 1:May it change everything about us as community. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.