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Vision Sunday - Acts 1
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
See, Easter is about a world that you once thought was absolutely fixed and permanent. A world that you thought was rigid and unmovable, and then all of a sudden at Easter, it's like everything becomes malleable. Welcome to the commons cast. 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. Welcome today, and welcome to the first Sunday of Eastertide. My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here at Commons, and we have just come through the biggest celebration of the year. For six weeks during Lent, we prepared our hearts and our minds and our souls.
Speaker 1:And then last week, we let all of that excitement and anticipation find voice on Easter Sunday as resurrection finally returned to the world, and it was amazing. However, Easter is only the start of our celebration in the Christian tradition. Never let anyone tell you that Christians don't know how to party because Easter actually begins the weeks long fifty day celebration of resurrection that we call Eastertide. And so even though all of the wonderful Easter decorations have been taken down, you will see on the sidewall there some new images of Eastertide to remind us that resurrection surrounds us always. And our tradition here at Commons has always been to start Eastertide by looking forward together.
Speaker 1:We call this Vision Sunday every year, and it's a chance for us to recalibrate in the light of Easter and to begin to imagine where we might head together in the coming year. I'm sure you know, hopefully, that every year we produce a journal that outlines our teaching and our direction for the year. If you don't have one, by all means, please stop by the connection center in the gym, grab one before you leave. They're free, and they'll give you a lot of information about the community. But internally, as soon as Easter is over, all of the prep now begins for the coming year's journal.
Speaker 1:Envision Sunday is part of how we begin to focus on those next steps for the community. However, before we jump in today, I do have a couple community notes. And first of all, we want to say thank you so much to all of the volunteers who helped us pull last Sunday off. There were almost 1,300 people here joining us to hear the story of Jesus. It was our biggest Sunday ever, and it took more than 100 volunteers just to make one Sunday happen.
Speaker 1:And we are so thankful for all of you who give your time and your resources and your donations to make this community possible, to give us the opportunity to share this surprising story of Jesus with so many people. So thank you for that. It's an incredible privilege for our team to pastor this community, and thank you for being part of that story. Second, this is a bit of an announcement, but it flows really well into vision Sunday because we are hosting another blanket exercise this Saturday here at the Kensington Parish. And the blanket exercise is an interactive experience that's designed by indigenous peoples to help walk settlers through the land rights history of Canada, in particular treaty seven, and the history that a lot of us are sadly ignorant to.
Speaker 1:And it's a really open and accessible way to learn about the history of our country and our neighbors, and to move toward understanding, which breeds empathy, which is a first step toward reconciliation. And so if you've never experienced this before, I really want to encourage you to register. It's a fantastic experience. Space is limited, but you can register online, commons.church/events on your phone, or stop by the connection center before you leave to sign up. I really know you'll appreciate this chance.
Speaker 1:Now here's what I wanna talk about that on Vision Sunday before we jump in. Because in many ways, events like this are core to our vision as community. That we trust that as we listen to each other, and we share with each other, and we open ourselves to incorporate the stories of the other, We become more fully complete versions of ourselves. And this goes for us as individuals, but it also goes for us as a body. We are not complete as a church without the stories of indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1:We're not complete until we learn how to listen to women and queer persons and white men and immigrants and people of color because every time we open ourselves to hear someone else's story, and we recognize the profound beauty within it, every time we notice spirit in another, we come closer to noticing the divine everywhere. And that is what Easter is all about. That Jesus is alive, that resurrection is everywhere, and that spirit infuses and animates and sustains every breath in everyone we encounter. However, we are getting our set of ourselves here, so we'll reel it back in and pray, and then we'll talk vision together. God of resurrection, of life returned and hope renewed, God of open arms and big dreams, would you help us to grasp just how significant your love for us really is?
Speaker 1:And in that, might we begin to let go of the pursuit of anything that hinders or splinters or fractures our love for you. Help us to dream big dreams, but not just dreams of things we want. Instead, might our dreams come from being immersed in your imagination for your world. Right? They'd be the kind that pulls us into the future you hope for, the kind that invites us to become the people you created us to be.
Speaker 1:And so where our priorities need to be flexed or fixed or completely reinvented in you, where we have ideas and goals and aspirations that need to be reoriented around your story, Would you grant us wisdom that inspires us to see what is truly possible with you? Do more than resuscitate us to the life we have already lived, but bring us into something truly new and beautiful and profoundly new. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Today we are gonna talk about our vision as a community and where we're heading and that means it's a bit of a different kind of Sunday and sermon. And so I wanna take some time to talk about some of the initiatives that we hope to put some of our energy into this year. We wanna talk about some of the pinch points and the opportunities that we see ahead of us as community, but then we want to turn our attention back to scripture to ground some of the core animating ideas of commons in the story of Jesus. And so we have a lot to do today, but I do think we can make this kind of a fun ride. However, first, perhaps, a bit of a story.
Speaker 1:I'm a pastor, and you know that because you're here in front of me in this room, so no surprises here yet. But this can be surprising information for a lot of people who know me or have met me in a different context than this. And it's a very strange thing to see the assumptions that come along with my career. One of the ways that culturally we tend to engage with someone we have just met is to ask, well, what do you do? And it's not that I'm embarrassed by what I do, I love what I do, but sometimes I do wish that that question came further along in the friendship courtship because it tends to throw some people off.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I will meet someone and they will ask what you do, and I will say, I'm a pastor, and they say, oh, I get it. I see the resemblance as the beard and the hair like a uniform. Like, that's just a thing you guys do. And I have to say, no. That is just a total lack of commitment to style on my part.
Speaker 1:Other times, though, the response is more dramatic. I remember once, true story, I introduced myself to a friend of a friend. He asked what I did. I said I was a pastor, he responded like a priest, like you've never had sex before? And so I said, one, no, and two, no, and three, way too fast, man.
Speaker 1:But my inability to make friends aside, there is a very real transition that has been and is now accelerating in our culture in Canada, as evidenced by people's increasingly dramatic responses to my career choice. And that is the movement away from Christianity and even religion as a cultural default. Now, people can and do lament that. That has never been my approach. In fact, in my experience, default religion often actually closes us off from rather than opens us up to each other.
Speaker 1:And so I have long seen the changes in culture as opportunity rather than threat. One of the driving motivations behind the launch of Commons was this. Just another church was not worth leaving my job and my salary behind to start something new, but a new way to talk about Christianity and a new audience to engage with the story of Christ, a new conversation about how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus changes everything for all of us. That seemed like it was worth taking a chance on. And really, that's what commons was initially meant to do, to take people who had had a cultural experience of Christianity, who knew somewhere inside that there was something meaningful to Christianity, but who knew it wasn't working for them anymore.
Speaker 1:And to give them a new encounter, a new language, new community that would help them reconnect to the core Jesus story that they had felt obscured from. And most of you actually tell us you fit into that category. You were connected to the Jesus story, then you stepped away from the Jesus story, and now you've come back to the Jesus story. That for me is everything. To think that we get to play a role in reconnecting human beings to the divine, this is too beautiful.
Speaker 1:And it has been a remarkable ride. From an initial team of about 40 leaders coming together with a community of about 20 people who had faithfully stewarded this historic property, and then less than five years later to welcome almost 1,300 people across two parishes and five celebrations to Easter Sunday. That is unheard of. But to get to stand here and say that Christianity is not what you thought. It is not a retreat from hard questions.
Speaker 1:It is not stayed and dispassionate and boring. It is not a religion in service of the status quo, but is instead a call to the peace and the simplicity and the wall breaking and the welcoming of Jesus. That it is more than a transaction. It is an invitation to know yourself as loved and to live in the way of Jesus. That message and the opportunity to share it has been the privilege this community has had for almost five years.
Speaker 1:And I don't see any of that changing in the future ever, but I do see some very significant changes that are happening in the culture that surrounds this community. You see, as I said, commons were built for those of us who had stepped back from Christianity. And there is still a ton of work to be done in that area here in the city, of course there is. But as culture continues to change, the dones are being replaced by the nones. Those are terms that we use when we talk about the sociology of religion.
Speaker 1:If you're really interested in that, you should talk to Scott, who is our parish pastor in Inglewood because he is literally a sociologist. But where the dones are those who have stepped away from religion, the nones are what we call those who have nothing to begin with. And all of the research in Canada, all of the anecdotal evidence we have, all of the stories that we are hearing from community tells us that the era of the duns is ending and the dawn of the nuns is upon us. And I mean it all sounds very dramatic when I say it that way. Right?
Speaker 1:But the thing is, things don't change overnight. There are still a lot of people with a cultural memory of Christianity that need to be invited to encounter Jesus in new ways. But increasingly the real opportunity lies with those who have never stumbled upon the Jesus story. And that is really exciting. Because what it means is that as much fun as we have had these past five years, we now need to start relearning everything we've just figured out.
Speaker 1:And this is new for us. As a team, as leadership, as a community, all of us need to be very open to listening and learning about wondering about where we go next. But what we do know coming out of Easter is that resurrection means the best is always still ahead of us. And so there are three areas that I wanna talk about today that we are beginning to put our energy into before we make the pivot back to the scriptures to grind our ground ourselves in the story that animates all of our vision for community. And so today, we wanna talk about touch points, communities, seats, and starting lines.
Speaker 1:And there's a very interesting pattern that we hear consistently from people who find their way to commons. The farther they consider themselves from Christianity, the newer touch points they need before they ever walk through the door. And that shows up in a couple different ways. First of all is invites. It's okay to invite someone more than once.
Speaker 1:Now don't pester people, that's annoying, but sometimes, especially when something is new for someone, we need time to process that opportunity. So learn to read the room. I mean, don't be that guy that can't take a hint. But just because you've invited someone to church and they don't jump at the opportunity at the first invite, that doesn't mean the conversation is over. All the best things take time.
Speaker 1:But perhaps even more interesting here is the fact that the farther someone starts from Christianity, the more touch points they tend to have with us before they ever show up in the room. And so we find that if you have moved to the neighborhood and you're looking for a church, you might just show up one day. If you have attended another church but you're looking for something that fits a bit better, you might watch a video of a sermon online before coming. If you have stepped away from church and you're considering coming back, then you are probably checking us out on Facebook and on YouTube and you're probably subscribing to the podcast and listening for quite a while before ever stepping foot in the church. But if you have little to no background in the Christian story, what we're hearing is that you are probably watching and engaging and listening online for months, if not years, before ever testing out community.
Speaker 1:And I think instinctively that makes a lot of sense. Right? The less you know, the more apprehensive you are. And you wanna make sure that you are really honestly welcome here. You wanna see if this Jesus actually impacts you in meaningful ways before you ever risk going face to face.
Speaker 1:And this is why, since the new year, hopefully, you've started to notice that we are putting a lot more energy into our digital content. We are trying to create conversations for Facebook and YouTube in order to make those connections more quickly and more personally, even if that conversation needs to live online for longer than it might have in the past. And for us this is new, we're really not sure what we're doing yet, but the intent is to begin as many conversations as early as possible and extend them as long as we need to so that people have a more comfortable road into community. And our goal right now is to create something every week that supplements the weekend and gives all of us, those of us here in the room and those lurking online listening to this podcast right now, new opportunities to engage the story of Jesus throughout the week between the Sundays. That, however, moves us to community.
Speaker 1:Because those touch points are great, but they are still often one way. Right? Don't get me wrong, sermons are nice, they're a great introduction, and ultimately though, they are pretty limited in terms of life change. Now, I love my job. I love writing, I love speaking, I love getting up here and talking, but I'm also not naive about where lives are actually impacted in this community.
Speaker 1:Because when we hear stories, very rarely are they about what happened from the stage. They are almost always about the connections made between real people. And we have lots of ways to facilitate connection here. Last year, we talked on this Sunday about the need to get smaller. This idea that it's groups and teams and dinners as the primary ways that commons comes alive.
Speaker 1:But we also know that every individual, every family, every single one of us are just really busy these days. We can't overcome that for you. We talked about this back in January, that you need to make a commitment to friendships. You have to work at friendships. You have to create room for friendships or they don't happen.
Speaker 1:And I know it sounds weird, but friendship is a discipline and it's one that Jesus made time for. But we can work on thinking about new avenues for community. And one of the areas that we're looking at this year is our groups. Now we have an amazing group of groups. There are now more than 30 groups within the city that meet across the town, with more than 300 people attending them in any given week, and that's great.
Speaker 1:But we also know that that kind of schedule just isn't an option for a lot of us, even if we might want to make a serious effort. And so we're going to begin to experiment with new formats for groups in addition to what we're already doing. First, we're looking at some short term groups that might meet for a defined period of time with a start and an end date to make things a little more accessible. We're looking at synchronous digital groups, which sounds fancy, but really that just means we're looking at some options for video calling that could enable a group to meet regularly online and occasionally in person. And we're putting together the resources and the technology to help make that happen for you.
Speaker 1:And finally, we're looking at asynchronous digital. And this is about using a platform like Slack or Discord, if you've used those before, but essentially to create a private chat room for groups so that people can jump in and out of an ongoing conversation even if they can't all get together at the same time and place. And the idea here is not that digital can ever meaningfully replace a face to face conversation, it can't. But we want to acknowledge that digital technology has a remarkable way and an ability to make community accessible to new people if we use it appropriately. Part of the beauty of the gospel is that it meets us where we are, not where we assume we need to be like a church sanctuary.
Speaker 1:And so we want to keep pushing that good news into spaces it's not expected, and that brings us, however, to seats. Because as early as we want to start these conversations and as accessible as we want to make those conversations, there will always be something about gathering that is core to the Christian tradition. You see, part of the beauty of church is that we come when we feel like it and we come when we don't. That we come when we're ready to believe, and that we come when we need to be reminded that others believe. We come when we sing, we come when we can't, and we trust that someone else will be there to sing for us.
Speaker 1:And that kind of solidarity, that mix of faith and doubt and trust and community in a room together is an essential part of the Christian story. But it also means we need room. Or, more accurately, what it really means is that we need rooms. Because one of our central convictions at Commons is that smaller communities often do a better job of facilitating connection. And don't get me wrong, being in a crowd is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:There's something very powerful about attending a concert or a flames game or experiencing a moment with a packed room like Easter Sunday. And someday, I would love to try to pull off a commons wide event where we have everyone together for worship. But on the whole, my contention is that smaller is really where it's at. And this is why, as we have grown, we have worked to add more services and then a second parish rather than reaching for a bigger room. Because there's something about the size of the room that says something important about this community.
Speaker 1:Even if we have to do it five times on a Sunday. As we know, just over a year into our Inglewood experiment, we are getting close to capacity here in Kensington all over again. Now we are nowhere near launching a third parish, so you can breathe a sigh of relief here. But if you remember last time, it took us about two years to lay the groundwork for our Inglewood Parish from when we started talking about it. And this is where we find ourselves all over again, at the start of our next great experiment.
Speaker 1:And we don't know who will lead it yet, we don't know where it will be yet, But we do know that we need to continue to work to create more room for more people to reconnect to the story of God. And that is amazing, Because it means it's time for us to dream all over again about starting all over again. And this is really what resurrection is about. You see, last week was Easter and it was amazing, but resurrection is always about what comes next. And I put up a video this week online talking about that inevitable after Easter letdown that happens when you work for a church.
Speaker 1:I mean, you put in all of this work and all of this effort and all of this preparation and the energy is there and it's incredible. But then Monday morning, you wake up and you realize you have to do it all over again in six days. And no matter how much you love your job, feeling like you have to top Easter is daunting, but it's also not healthy. Because resurrection is never about looking back or returning to where you've already been, the moments of your greatest successes. It's always about moving forward into something new.
Speaker 1:Because resurrection is fresh and exciting and maybe even a little bit scary because resurrection is always about what is on the horizon. And so every Easter, I come through the big day and I rest and I reflect and I catch my breath and then I open the book of acts to remind myself about what comes next. And I find that every year I am always caught off guard by it. Because you see in Acts one one, we read the author begin by saying that in my former book Theophilus And by the way, Theophilus means beloved friend of God. I've always liked to think that the author here is addressing all of us, not just some ancient individual.
Speaker 1:But beloved friend, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up to heaven. After giving instructions for the holy spirit to the apostles he had chosen, And after his suffering, he presented himself to them, gave many convincing proofs to the fact that he was alive. He appeared to them for a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion while he was eating with them, he gave this command, do not leave Jerusalem but wait for the gift my father promised which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:Then they gathered around him and they asked, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? But he said, don't worry about that. Don't focus on going back. All of that is above your pay grade anyway because dates and times are for God not for you. But you will receive power when the spirit comes on you.
Speaker 1:And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And then, he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here staring into the sky? Those are the first 11 verses that follow the gospels, and for me, it's the perfect response to the Monday morning after Easter.
Speaker 1:Because this is what resurrection is about. Why are you standing here looking at what just happened when there's a whole new life that's ahead of you now? You see, I think that sometimes the big moments in our lives, a baptism, a birthday, a promotion, a resurrection, all of these beautiful moments can actually become a detriment if we allow them to turn our beginnings into endings. I mean, you graduate and then what? You work hard for your retirement and then what?
Speaker 1:You achieve all your goals and everything you set out to do, and then what? Maybe you celebrate Easter and it's amazing, but then what? Except that Jesus knows that our most important moments are starting lines. You see Easter is about a world that you once thought was absolutely fixed and permanent. A world that you thought was rigid and unmovable, and then all of a sudden at Easter, it's like everything becomes malleable.
Speaker 1:And if Jesus can die and then come back to life, if death is not the end, then maybe nothing is as permanent as it seems. Maybe none of the hurdles in front of you, maybe none of the challenges that scare you, maybe nothing that stops you from stepping into God's vision for you and who you might become are really the obstacle they seem to be at first. Look, I'm not gonna pretend that any of this is easy for any of us, but maybe Easter is as much about what comes next as it is about what has already happened. In other words, maybe Easter is what leads us fearlessly into Eastertide. A celebration of life returned.
Speaker 1:And that's what vision is all about. Whether it is your personal imagination for what comes next, whether it is us as a church listening together for where God will lead us, whether it is your moment with God where spirit reminds you that the very breath in your lungs means you're not done yet. Easter is about a vision for what comes next. And Eastertide, this fifty day celebration of life that we enter now, well, this is the invitation to stop staring at the sky and to start living as if resurrection was real. And that's what drives us.
Speaker 1:That's what animates us. That's what puts breath and bone and muscle behind the vision for God's kingdom. This conviction that coming back to life is just the beginning. And so in whatever way you need to experience new vision in your world today, whether it is new imagination for Christ in you to the world, whether it's new language to tell your story, whether it is space to find your place here at Commons as we move forward together. May you know that God is always ahead of you, calling you somewhere new.
Speaker 1:You are no longer lost. You are now being found. You are no longer broken. You are now being healed. You are no longer dying because you are now becoming everything God imagines you to be.
Speaker 1:And until that day when you come face to face with the divine, the best is always yet to come. Let's pray. God of resurrection, who invites us not only to witness your return, but to experience resurrection now. Life bubbling up and abundant with this us. God who invites us into now the celebration of life returned.
Speaker 1:Might we capture a vision for where it is that you would take us next. As individuals who you have an imagination for, a plan for, a purpose for, Might you, by your spirit, be near to us, speaking to us, encouraging us, motivating us, giving us the energy and the sustenance to move forward into that future, even if it's a little bit scary. For us as a church, knowing that there has been great things in our past, but even more in our future. Would you give us courage to risk and to try even to fail when we need to, but never to stop dreaming about what comes next? And in that, might we all be drawn closer into an imagination, a relationship, an encounter with you.
Speaker 1:The God who brings all things back to life. The God who upholds and sustains every one of us. The God who is speaking new things to each of our stories. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.