Speaker 1: 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 2: This week, I was in a bunch of meetings with staff, and I had just Come out of a bunch of meetings with the board and community, and I was not feeling particularly curious about anything. And I kinda brushed off some questions a bit abruptly. And after the meeting, Bobby said to me, you know, Jeremy, you probably could have used that line tell me more a few more times there. And it was a really good reminder for me to Debt and reengage and work on curiosity as a discipline. So if the staff are using this series against me when necessary, I think that's a win for all of us, actually.
Because what this conversation is about is that fact that curiosity doesn't always come easily, and it has to be cultivated. And that goes for our loved ones and family. It goes for our colleagues and coworkers. It also goes for those seemingly random people who we interact with throughout the week. And in the 1st week of this series, I talked about some of the factors that are working against curiosity.
The way that social media can overload us with opinions and perspectives and how that can actually shut down our curiosity to explore new ideas. The way that evolutionarily, we are wired to jump to conclusions and to rely on stereotypes to make decisions quickly. And the way that we can, because of that, be afraid to grow and change and shift our perspective if we think that might Threaten our place within our bounded communities. But the beautiful thing about being human is that we can transcend those barriers. Fact that this is what God invites us to do.
It's what God demonstrates for us in incarnation. And as I said that week, this is about more than just tips and tricks. It's about part of the spiritual journey to transcend the limits that have been imposed on us by our biology or our culture or, let's be honest, sometimes just our stubbornness and to be curious about what we can learn from each other. Now really quickly that week, I introduced a particular way of thinking about stages of development. Some people were curious about that and sent me some emails.
So this past week, I put together a video that's available on our YouTube channel Talking about curiosity and personal development and spiral dynamics and stages of development, and if you're interested, you can check out all of that when you have a chance this week. There's a lot of great stuff there, beyond Sundays at youtube.com/commonschurch. But then last week, Bobbie picked up the conversation in part 2, and she talked to us about the move from curiosity into intimacy. And one of the things that she brought up was the way that we sometimes misuse conflict in our relationships. So sometimes, we enter into any conflict ready for a fight.
You know, we jump on Twitter looking to dunk on someone, and That's conflict, but it's not very curious. So sometimes we've already made up our mind, and we're not willing to learn. We're only willing to fight. Then on the other side of it, sometimes we actually run from conflict, conflict that can actually deepen our relationships if we let it. So too often, I think we fight in the relationships that don't matter, and we won't fight for the ones that do.
Now Fight might not be the right word. I I don't really like that all the time, but I do know that conflict, when it's honest and it's open And it's not triangulated and manipulative. It's really important in all of our relationships. Rachel and I Would not have made it to 21, almost 22 years of marriage now had we not learned how to bring ourselves more honestly into our fights. And when we actually get curious about what someone brings to us even when we see things differently, we really tap into a lot of wisdom.
Now don't get me wrong. There are perspectives, and there are people, and there are positions, and there are postures that are not healthy for you. And for you to stay healthy, you don't need or want to engage with all of them. That's not my point. But there are parts of the world that we will always have trouble accessing on our own.
And so being curious about those who offer a new perspective with grace and kindness and care is a spiritual discipline that will serve us well. So how do we get there? Well, we've gotta learn to listen to each other. That is our conversation for today. So let's pray, and then let's listen.
God who listens, who opens a divine heart, who lends a holy ear, who is ready and willing and eager to listen to our prayers today. Be they filled with thanks or tinged with doubt or perhaps even drowned in despair. Might we know that you listen? And might that simple conviction give us comfort today for whatever weight it is that we brought with us into this room. And thank god, Once we know that we have your listening ear and have felt your welcoming embrace, Might we slowly learn to bring that same comfort and curiosity into our conversations with each other?
Might we learn to listen well and to listen actively? Might we demonstrate care and kindness in our presence and maybe especially even in our silence. May the grace of God permeate slowly into every encounter, and might we be curious about each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.
Okay. Today is a conversation about listening, and we are gonna talk about updated editions and missing verses and how does he know and what do we really want. But at some level, probably all of us have some sense of the fact that we could be better at listening. Literally, something like 3 days ago at dinner, I asked my son what happened at kid inventor day at school. This is a program they have in his school where they spend a day coming up with a new invention.
His was a playground with a built in outdoor Minecraft screen where you could go outside and still play on screens. 2 birds with 1 stone, he told me. I don't know. But as I turned to him at the dinner table, he turned stone faced to me, and he said, dad, you already asked me that on the drive home, and I already told you all about it. Now he was right, and I did, and he had.
So I said, yeah. But your mom doesn't know about it. I was hoping you could tell her. Now I'm not sure he bought it, but I think we skated through and got to the dinner. But thing is, I absolutely did remember parts of the drive home Because I had just gotten a new pair of sunglasses that day, and when my son got in the car, he immediately said to me, dad, are those new glasses?
Because they're awesome. You look super cool. And I'll tell you what, I remembered that part of the drive home. Not only did I remember that, I remembered it so hard that I came to work the next day and told all my coworkers about it because I was pretty proud of that moment. I do not put a lot of time into my fashion, and so I will take a compliment whenever I can get it, especially when it comes from my 9 year old son.
And by the way, if you're new to the community, yes, I absolutely do. Wear the same thing every day. I have for years. It's not your imagination. It's fine.
But this is it. Right? We, all of us, we listen for the things we want to hear. Those of us who like to talk, We tend to listen for the moment we can jump in with our story. Those of us who need some affirmation, maybe we listen for the compliment we are fishing for.
Those of us looking for a fight, we listen for anything we can bounce off and contradict. That's not all bad. You can use that to your advantage. I've talked before about assuming the best about the people you love. I'll talk about my marriage again.
One of the most important practices in my life, one that I struggle with a lot but I am committed to working on, has been training myself to always assume to listen for the best in what my wife, Rachel, says. So instead of assuming that she meant to annoy me Or insult me or belittle me or attack me, I try to slow my response down long enough to realize that actually 90% of the time, My initial reaction has more to do with my day or my mood or my frustrations than it does with anything she actually said. And so training myself to listen for what I want or maybe to hear what I choose to hear Can actually filter out some of the dysfunction that I bring with me into our relationship. Not all of it, but some. Still, I think we know that often our desire to hear what we want to hear is, perhaps we could say it this way, less noble.
And this is where Jesus becomes a really interesting challenge for us because I don't think that Jesus comes into conversations Listening for what he wants to hear, at least not in the negative sense. You know, I will say, I do think Jesus always looks for the best in us. In fact, I think Jesus always finds the best in us, particularly when we struggle to find it in ourselves. That's what makes greats possible. God sees the possibilities even when we don't.
But when it comes to the art of listening, I think we often come up against this imagination of Jesus already Knowing where the conversation is going to go. There's a passage in Matthew where the writer says, Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, why do you entertain evil in your hearts? Then in John 2, we read But Jesus would not entrust himself to the crowds for he knew all people. Well, how do you listen well when you already know the outcome? Can you?
Is that even really listening? It just kinda sounds more like waiting. Well, I wanna suggest Two things we can look for today in our passage, our interaction we're gonna see Jesus in. 1st, Yes. I absolutely do think that Jesus was interested in people and what they chose to disclose about themselves to him.
But second, that, no, listening is not just about information gathering. Therefore, sometimes the best listening happens when we already know what needs to be said, but we make the space for someone to say it anyway. So let's turn to John 5 because there's this really interesting interaction here, and this is what we read starting in verse 2. Today, I'm gonna read from the NRSVUE, which is a new translation that just came out at the end of last year. It is the updated edition of the new version of the revised version of the standard version.
If that's confusing, you're absolutely correct. We'll come back to that in a moment, but first, Let's read. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate, there was a pool called in Hebrew Beth zatha, which has 5 porticos, Essentially, 5 small pools. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. 1 man was there who had been ill for 38 years.
When Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been there a very long time. He said to him, do you want to be made well? No. Let's start. I wanna talk about why I like the NRSVUE here.
I still find the NIV, the new international version, a generally overall easier to read translation. I have no problem recommending that to anyone as a starting point. It's the translation we often use here on our screens at commons. Particularly, after a verse, you will see NIV 11. That is the latest update to the NIV that was released in 2011.
That's what that means. However, the NRSV has also been a translation that I use a lot because it's very good, Very technical. It's a little more literal, which has its ups and downs to it, but that can be helpful when you're using 2 different versions to compare. That said, this new updated edition, the UE, has done 2 things primarily. 1, It has shifted to using more gender neutral language unless the text is specifically calling for a gendered pronoun.
And 2, they have moved toward using people first language, which we can see here in this passage. So the NIV has the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. And later, it will refer to this man as the invalid. The NRSV UE has chosen to go with many blind, lame, and paralyzed people. Now if you're like me And you've not experienced disability, and the othering that can happen with that, that might not seem like a really big deal.
Like, what's the difference between the paralyzed and the paralyzed person, Jeremy. Move on. But using, choosing words that subordinate a position or a person to their circumstance, Even if unintentionally, can absolutely subtly shape the way that we think of each other and what's important about somebody. All of our experiences, including our experiences of our bodies, are part of who we are, but they never tell the whole story about us. And so choosing our language intentionally to invite and honor and leave room for a person to narrate their own story in a way that makes sense for them is really significant.
And I think that alone makes the NRSVUE an important date and one that I'm really glad to have in my toolkit and on my desk. That said, I also think, ironically, that this translation choice is reflective of the kindness that is actually precisely what Jesus is trying to demonstrate in this interaction. Still, before we get there, there's 1 more thing we need to talk about here, and it's verse 4. Because if you happen to pull out your Bible and read along, you might have noticed that verse 4 doesn't exist. So if you're reading from a modern Bible translated in the last couple 100 years, you will jump straight from verse 3 to verse 5.
And And the reason for that is that biblical scholarship is ongoing. See, we don't actually have a complete copy of the New Testament till around the 4th century. And in fact, the earliest English translations like the King James We're based on a Greek compiled text called the Textus Receptus, which wasn't published until 15 16 of the Common Era. In the 500 years since that time though, we have found a lot of what we call fragmentary texts from much earlier, even from the late 1st 2nd century. And what that does is it lets us see where additions or changes have been made over time, and then we can do our best to update our understandings of what a text originally looked like.
And verse 4 in this chapter Was not originally in the text. Now the problem is by the time we figured that out, we had already given verse numbers to all the verses in the Bible. And the problem is if you change those, everyone's gonna be thrown off. So we just deleted verse 4. Now it's not a secret.
It's not a conspiracy. I promise if you look in your Bible, you will see a little asterisk with a footnote. And down at the bottom of the page, you will find verse 4. You can read it for yourself. By the way, there are 16 of these phantom verses throughout your New Testament.
They will all have a footnote. You can read them all. But the question is, well, what does verse 4 say? Well, it says that these people with various disabilities waited at the pools because From time to time, an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. And the first one into the pool, After such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had.
Now what's going on here Is that the original writer of John does not believe that watery angels healed people in special pools. So he doesn't include that in his story, but he knows his audience will know that myth well enough to make sense of the story and why people are waiting here at the pools. 100 of years later, when the Bible was being passed around the world to people who had no idea about the myths In the stories of Jerusalem, no one had any clue of what the pool with Bethesda was all about, so a scribe took it on themselves to add in this verse for context so the story would make some more sense. So there's nothing shady in the adding of the verse. There's nothing shady in the removal of it.
It is all just part of the complexity of biblical studies. Except now, we can pick up reading where we left off, and things will actually make sense. Jesus asks, do you want to be well? And the ill man answered, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. See, without verse 4, it's a little tough to know what he's talking out here.
And while I am making my way, someone else gets down ahead of me. K. Now we know what's going on in the story. This ill man is some kind of a disease that has hindered his mobility. He has been likely for years putting his trust And the only option that he can imagine, this myth about special waters and descending angels and racing patrons, and here comes Jesus along saying, do you want to be well?
Now there's a few things I notice when I read this. I notice The story begins because Jesus had, quote, learned that this man had been in this condition for a very long time. That's the NIV. And I can't help but wonder exactly what does that mean. Is this one of those Jesus knew what was in their hearts moments?
He just saw him. He knew this about him, and off we go into the story, maybe. But I think, actually, Just as easily, this could be a summary of a conversation. In Greek, the term here is ginosko. It means to come to know, and here, it's in the participle aorist form.
If you remember English class, participle syllables are I n g words. So So you could go with something like Jesus saw the man and learning that he had been in this position for 38 years. He said, do you want to be well? Now if you read that, and if it wasn't Jesus and it wasn't in the Bible, you would probably assume that that learning came through a conversation, which honestly Kind of changes the vibe of the story a bit for me. This isn't just a rhetorical moment.
It's not antagonistic. Jesus is legitimately curious about this man. He's noticed him. He's engaged with him. Jesus is asking a question that comes in response to something that has emerged in the self disclosure of this man, and I think that's really important to the story.
Because often, I think, at least if you are anything like me, you can very quickly jump to offering your opinion or your solution or your Personal coaching before you've properly listened to someone. I think this is particularly true When I don't have the same lived experience as that person, learning to slow down and actually listen to each other is vital. Because even if Jesus does know this magically, mystically, in some kind of spirit informed moment, he still Slows down long enough to ask a question. And I think that's because often listening, Really listening is not just about the information we learn. It's about the space that we Create for someone to tell us about themselves.
To be honest, this is one thing that I am still Absolutely working on and learning in my life. I am someone who very quickly jumps to conclusions, and often, unfortunately, I am intuitive enough to jump to very reliable conclusions. And because of that, it makes it hard to slow down and listen well. But what I have to remind myself is that simply gathering in information is not listening, at least not in the relational sense that we actually need from each other. Because here's the thing.
We don't just need to be understood. We do need to be heard as well. And this is why learning to engage and to form our questions in response To what is actually being shared with us, not what we think we know, becomes such a vital skill for us. I mean, look at what is being shared in this story. We learned that this man has been in this condition for 38 years, Implying that he's probably older than that.
Implying that something happened to him at some point in his life. He says he has no one to help him into the water, indicating that probably at some point over time, his community has faded, and They've drifted away, and they've left him with very little social support. I can imagine that at some point in the last 4 decades, Maybe his friends and family, maybe they originally brought him to the pool attempting to get him in and heal. But when that illusion never materialized, they lost hope And they gave up, and he didn't have the option to do that, so he stayed. And so here, Jesus' query, Do you want to be well is more than just a rhetorical device.
It's an opportunity for this man who can't walk, Who doesn't have a community to support him, who is, for all intents and purpose, in this culture, at this time, at the mercy of strangers, it's an opportunity for this man to finally express his own agency. And I think we ignore that larger context to our detriment because this story is about a lot more than just physical healing. It's about the letting go of myths that have defined us for a very long time. See, the truth is, Do you want to be well or something like it is a question that all of us are gonna have to face at some point in our lives. We've all put our trust in some kind of illusion that overpromised and that underdelivered.
And maybe that was a myth about Miracle Waters. I don't know. But sometimes it's a relationship that wasn't what it claimed to be or a theological foundation that wasn't as firm as it appeared to be, or maybe it's just a career that wasn't as fulfilling as you thought it would be. But the longer we've put our hope in those possibilities and the farther down that path we've locked, the more years we have spent trusting in one thing, The harder it is to let it go. And, look, I'm sorry.
I understand why this man believes it. I feel the anguish of 38 years of hoping, but angels do not come down from heaven to stir up waters and Pit people in need against each other in some kind of race for God's entertainment. It's just it's not true. The thing is none of our myths are any more true than this one. We know that Satisfaction won't come from more Instagram followers and that we won't find the relate relationship just because we put the right Keywords in our dating profile.
We know that our sense of well-being won't change because we upgraded to a house with 13.5% more square footage, and yet we Keep trying, and we keep buying, and then we wonder why we're lonely and we're exhausted all the time. When maybe the problem is that we actually haven't let someone get close enough to ask us what we really want and who we really want to become. Look. I get it. Of course, this man wants to be made well.
What's the big deal, Jerry? Move on. But for me, it's the fact that Jesus cares enough to ask that matters. So I'm convinced that it's Jesus' curiosity that is able to shift this man's perspective from What I want is to be first into the water. To actually, what I want is to be made well.
And those are 2 very different things. And we spend a lot of our time chasing the first And not nearly enough time having honest conversations about the second. Miroslav Volf once wrote That the truth will set you free, and the truth does set you free, but it's by connecting you to what is real. Truth is what liberates us from our fantasies, from our alternative facts, From our lies and have truths, that which when believed push us into the pit of false fears and drive us up the sandy slopes of false aspiration. You see, as tragic as it is, it does not matter how long this man lies by this pool, And it does not matter if he can coax a stranger to get him in first because for 38 years, he's bought into the wrong story.
And, unfortunately, the truth is far too often, so have you and I. But if all we ever do is assume that everyone we encounter is chasing the same futile miss that we are, And we never muster the curious courage to get forced into each other's lives and ask real questions about what we really want and who we Really want to become eventually, what will happen is we will find ourselves decades down the wrong path with a mountain of sunk cost Chasing a dream that we know won't really deliver, but there is an alternative. And I am increasingly convinced that it starts when we cultivate our curiosity, And we learn to push past our assumptions, and we start to craft good questions, and then we wait long enough to actually hear each other's answers. Because I think it's in the listening that we are able to dismantle the myths that we have bought into about of cells, about our world, and maybe most importantly, about each other. Listening is not just about the information you gather.
It's about tone and inflection and pain and hesitation. It's when we listen for nuance and experience and anxiety and celebration. It's uncovered when we hear the depth and the humanity and the conviction and the confusion that someone conveys beneath their words to us face to face. And all of that takes a profound curiosity that sometimes does not come easily. But it's one that I'm convinced might actually start to make us well By freeing us from some of the things that we've been chasing so that we can actually decide who it is that we want to become.
Let's pray. Our curious god who is always interested in us, who's always leaning in and leaning down to figure out what it is that we are wrestling with today, who is always willing to listen to our prayers, whatever perspective they come from. God, may that curiosity Demonstrated in the divine, make us more curious about each other. Like, we ask good questions of ourselves, about who we are and what we've been chasing and who we really want to be. Right?
We allow ourselves to be more vulnerable with the people that we know love us, To hear their questions and to respond with openness and vulnerability. Because in that, We learn something about ourselves. In that, we communicate something of our truth to another. And in that, our myths about the world can be dismantled. We can see ourselves with more true eyes.
We can love each other with more curious eyes, and then we can actually get on with the hard work of deciding who it is that we want to be, modeled in the example of your son, who shows us the path through the world that leads us to love and grace and peace. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.