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Summer Series Week Seven
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
We look at the gifts that fill our days, even in these uncertain times, and can't help but call them graces and be thankful.
Speaker 2: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 commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:Hi, everyone, and welcome to church. My name is Yelena. I'm one of the pastors on the team here at Commons, and we are so grateful you joined us on the live stream today. It means a lot to us that you tune in here and then track with us on our social media during the week and connect with the community through Zoom or in person. And we hope that all those points of connection contribute to the resilience we all need these days to feel okay.
Speaker 1:So thanks again for being here. We're still in our summer series, Speaking Sunday, where we continue to unpack words that carry weight in our vocabulary of faith. And we're trying to see what new meanings might be emerging. We have a couple more words to cover before our launch Sunday in September, but this week we are talking about grace. And grace is pretty prominent in how we all describe our experience of the Divine.
Speaker 1:We pray for grace when heading into a difficult situation. We say, This was grace, when we look back at certain events or trajectories in our lives and recognize God's presence in them. We look at the gifts that fill our days, even in these uncertain times, and can't help but call them graces and be thankful. We say grace before meals But also, grace pops up all over our worship songs, our liturgy, our scriptures, and our theology. After all, sola gratia by grace alone is one of solas of the Protestant Reformation.
Speaker 1:This foundational belief that salvation is solely based on God's favor towards sinful human beings, and that no work or merit can bring it about. And those of us who find home in the Protestant expression of Christianity would probably be familiar with this historical and theological angle on grace. Well, today, we are looking at the opening section in the Gospel of John to see what it might say to us about grace. And if you are taking notes, we will talk about creation as embodied grace, grace old and new, and bracketed grace. But first, let's pray.
Speaker 1:Our loving God, we thank you for the gift of this day, and for these summer months that have been so bittersweet. We've been doing our best to rest and recharge, but we also feel sad about all the limitations that mark our lives now. And as we look to the fall, we are both anxious and hopeful. So when we think about your grace today, would you open our eyes to see your presence in all things? Would you open our ears to hear the voice of love deep within and in the words of each other?
Speaker 1:And would you turn our hearts to places where we could step in with a bit more grace this fall. Spirit of the Living God, meet us in our need today and give us peace. Amen. Alright, before we jump in our text today, there are a couple of things that will help us to hear it better. First, we're looking at the prologue to the Gospel of John.
Speaker 1:And a prologue was a common feature in ancient biographies. It was meant to introduce you to the main character, to tell you the purpose of telling their story, and to give you an interpretive lens for the story. What's curious, though, is that John's prologue is a poem: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Even today, these opening lines grip our imagination. So it's not surprising that over the history of the Western Church, this prologue was read as a benediction over the sick, as a blessing over baptized children, used as a prayer, and even believed to protect against illness.
Speaker 1:It's kind of fascinating to think how a carefully crafted piece of poetry can in itself be experienced as a means of grace over a period of time. A contemporary poet, Lucy Shaw, believes that poets and prophets are not too far apart. Like prophecy, poetry pulls you into someone else's vision of reality, and invites you to make a connection. A poet is always asking, Can you see what I'm seeing? So as we work through the text today, we'll be asking, What is the vision of grace here?
Speaker 1:What connection am I invited to make? And secondly, the Greek word for grace, kairos, shows up only in the prologue. John does not pick it up in the Gospel again. So just hold on to that for now, because we'll come back to it later. Okay, now we're ready to look at some connections that John is making here.
Speaker 1:We'll start in John one verses one through five, and then jump to 14 through 18. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was Life, and that Life was the Light of all human beings.
Speaker 1:The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Now, John begins the story of Jesus by taking it all the way back to Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that opens like this: In the beginning, God created. For John though, before anything was created, the very life of God had already been stamped by the relationship of love and belonging. The Word, whom John later called Son, was with God. And everything was created out of a generous outpouring of that shared life, which Transarian theology would later describe as a mystery of mutual indwelling.
Speaker 1:In Genesis, God speaks creation into being. God calls it good, and God blesses it all. The day and the night, the land and what it produces, all living creatures and human beings, and even the time of work and time of rest. And John here reminds us that from that point on, the life of the Divine is bound up with the life of creation. God loves the world into being, and by doing that, God chooses to fully commit to it.
Speaker 1:And this idea of divine love pervades the Old Testament and is reflected in the Hebrew word for grace, hesed. Different Bible translations render Hesed differently. Loving kindness, steadfast love, abounding love, all trying to capture this kind of loving commitment that makes God, God, and which is reflected in how God towards people and creation. In his book, God and Creation, a theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, argues that the final goal of all God's work in the world is embodiment. For God, creation, reconciliation, and transformation of the world are all about being real.
Speaker 1:Meaning that God wants Hesed to be present and revealed in us and in what's around us. For Maltmann, the playfulness and physicality of creation are grounded in the fertile and inventive love of God. And what makes human beings the image of God is not our spirituality, but our whole and particular bodily existence. The flesh of the body is what makes it holy, because our weak and vulnerable flesh is also glorious, and sacred, and loved. And sure, it's harder to see the playfulness of creation in Alberta in February.
Speaker 1:And I totally don't get the inventive love of God for mosquitoes. They're the worst. But honestly, I often wonder how many times we need to hear and tell ourselves that our body is holy and glorious and loved before we come to know it deep within and start living out of that? And how many times we need to say and hear that sad about other bodies to see them as such? And in this pandemic life, when our physicality and our susceptibility to viruses have created so much anxiety and limitations.
Speaker 1:Where is grace in all that? Maybe it is in the realization that actually, we all are way more connected than we thought, and how we do life together can reveal the caring grace of the author of life. Or maybe grace is in the time it's taking us to grieve. There's been quite a bit of loss over the last six months for all of us. Or maybe it is in the opportunities that we still have and can discover.
Speaker 1:Relationships, skills, choices all that can help us flourish and create meaning, even within the limitations. John affirms that the loving Creator continues to be present in the world. The light shines in the darkness. And perhaps part of finding grace in the pandemic life is about training our eyes to notice it embodied where we wouldn't have looked before. Well, let's pick up in verse 14.
Speaker 1:The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John reminds his community that they have become participants in the revelation of God. If in the past, God's presence could only be experienced in special places like the tabernacle or the temple, now it is found in the human body, in the human community, in Jesus, who made our life his home. And then John makes another connection related to grace, which this time takes us back to the book of Exodus.
Speaker 1:We read: Out of Son's fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made God known. In Exodus 34, there is a story where Moses rather boldly asks God, Show me who you are. And in response, God does three things.
Speaker 1:First, God gives Moses a glimpse of all God's goodness. Secondly, God gives Moses the law, the 10 commandments, as a sign of an unbreakable covenant between God and the whole community of Israel. And finally, God describes God's self to Moses. God passed in front of Moses proclaiming, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. This is our chesed here.
Speaker 1:Maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. The language of the self revelation has shaped so much of the Old Testament imagination of the divine. But this phrase in John, We receive grace in place of grace already given, is a bit tricky. Are we talking about two kinds of grace here? The problem is that the scholars can't quite settle on the correct translation.
Speaker 1:The Greek here can be read as we have all received grace upon grace, with this idea of an exhaustible grace, of one gift coming after another. Or it can be read, as the NIV chooses here, grace in place of grace, was the sense of exchange or replacement. The new grace that comes through Jesus replaces the old grace of the law. The Greek word used for grace here, karius, is a bit different from hesed. Karius was generally used to describe an undeserved favor, or an unconditional free gift.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting is that charis appears in the New Testament about 154 times in total, and 100 of those occasions are in the writings of Paul. And because of the sheer volume, we often see grace through the eyes of Paul, who tends to emphasize the contrast between the law and grace. Most often than not, Paul talks about grace as a free gift of salvation offered in the person, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I believe that John's use of grace here includes that. The cross reveals and embodies the fullness of God's love for us.
Speaker 1:But grace for John is not only instrumental in salvation. It is also the reason behind creation, and it is at work in the transformation of all things. So, yes to grace in place of grace, which in Jesus makes new beginning in the story of the world. But also, yes to grace upon grace, the new grace that builds on and fulfills the old. The law was a gift of covenant love, and it was part of a larger story that needed time to unfold.
Speaker 1:And maybe it's not important whether the correct translation is upon or in place of. But it reminds me that if I hold on to only one meaning that I think is right, I might miss a bigger picture. And it reminds me that sometimes new things can be grasped and appreciated only in the context of what's come before. And it also gives me hope that the places where Jesus is not yet known, close by or across the world, are not devoid of grace. I may just not see the whole story yet.
Speaker 1:Now, in the epilogue, in chapter 20, John finally gives us his purpose for writing the Gospel. Jesus performed many other signs, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. This epilogue nicely loops back to the poem of the prologue, bracketing the narrative and picking up where John has started the story. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. In the Word, there was life.
Speaker 1:The one and only Son of God, full of grace and truth, has made God known. So except for the prologue, the actual word grace does not show up in the Gospel again. What appears, though, between the brackets, is the unfolding of Jesus' life his compassion, patience, his respect for those on the margins, his feeding off people and eating with people, his crying with friends and helping parties be more fun, his asking questions and challenging systems, his nonviolence, his love. The poetry of the prologue would be unintelligible without the story that gets unfolded between the brackets without Jesus embodying grace for us. Grace that has been pushing through to us all along, inviting us to see it in ourselves, in our communities, and in the whole world.
Speaker 1:So as you go into this week, I invite you to practice finding and naming grace. Maybe you can see it in the story that is unfolding for you right now. Maybe you find grace in making your body work hard for hours to bring you to the top of that mountain for that glorious view. Or maybe you recognize grace in a comforting hug at the end of a long day, or a quick text that says, Hey, I'm here for you. Wherever you look for grace, may it meet you there.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God of grace, as we seek to follow Jesus in these strange times, not knowing how to navigate the future, we ask for your loving kindness to guide us in our families, in our work, in how we build community and care for one another. Help us to remain faithful in our love for the world we live in, as we look for new ways to flourish and create flourishing around us. May we know your grace, may we live it, may we share it freely. In the strong name of Christ, we ask all this.
Speaker 1:Amen. Well, thank you so much for being here in the livestream. If you have a moment to say hi, join us on the Zoom Lounge. The link is in the video description. And if you want to join us for in person services, please register on comments.live.
Speaker 1:And we'll end as we'll always do here. Love God. Love people. Tell the story. Have a good week, everyone.
Speaker 1:Thanks.