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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
I like how one writer says Jesus is the ground of faith's possibility because that's it. That's your model. Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. So we are in our third week of our second summer series. And last week, I made the claim that I don't have a functioning faith without sacred practices.
Speaker 1:And we can get closer to what we mean by sacred practice when we look at the difference between habit and practice. Now there have been a lot of helpful, very popular, sometimes dreadfully boring books about habits in the last decade or so. There's tiny habits, atomic habits, the power of habit. We've learned a lot about habits. Habits are automatic.
Speaker 1:They are triggered by a cue. I wake up, scrub my retainers, drink a glass of water, put the kettle on to boil, and set up my AeroPress to make coffee. I don't even have to think about any of that. Habits are about efficiency. My mind has figured out how to get done what I need to do as easily as possible in the morning.
Speaker 1:Practices are different. They are deliberate, meant to shape your character and identity because they are aligned less with your basic attempts to get your needs met and more with your values. And I gotta say, religious tradition is where you find the masters of practice. Deep inside Christianity, there has always been this belief that to really do it right, to really seek God, you have to put the work in. That means being a part of a church community, praying and contemplating the presence of God, giving resources to what matters so that you can be a part of forming the world that you want to live in and make for others.
Speaker 1:But here's my question. Should practice come easy? And according to the ancient masters, no. Clement of Alexandria said, let no one think that he can come to the knowledge of God without toil and labor. Catherine of Siena said, nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.
Speaker 1:And Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, when Christ calls a person, he bids them come and die. And we don't have to look far in our lives to find the kind of satisfaction that comes when we really work at something that we want. I mean, you're athletes, you're artists, you're committed teachers and engineers, you're a parent, you're a student, you're a valued volunteer. And we are free. We are free to work at these things.
Speaker 1:And we get so much out of what doesn't come automatically or easily. You think that I started off being great at public speaking? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I came out of the womb like this. No. Not at all. I was actually quite shy, but I learned to love the thrill of this challenge. I grew to love finding precise words for what I want to say and I can't think of anything quite as sacred to me as when you are out there looking at me and I am up here looking at you and we are doing the work together of what it means to follow Christ.
Speaker 1:Maybe sacred practice isn't meant to come easy, but here's my hot take. I think it can be fun. We started the series talking about the benefits, the thrills of singing together. Last week, I talked about the pleasure of witnessing one's own life and journaling as an act of creation. Someone even wrote to me to say that they started their very first journal after that sermon.
Speaker 1:Man, I can hardly believe that. It's so cool. Today, we'll talk about the work, the exhilaration of pilgrimage as sacred practice. But first, let us pray. Loving God, as we settle in here today, we consider just something we are grateful for.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's a weekend of sunshine. Maybe it's the shift to get ready to the fall. Maybe it's a great conversation or seeing someone we haven't seen in a while. Thank you for the power of gratitude to place us in a receiving spot. For those of us who carry heavy burdens, loss, or a low mood, we can't seem to shake.
Speaker 1:Jesus, remind us of your friendship and your tender care at this time. Spirit who enlivens all of the world around us and seeks to heal it through us, won't you settle us in this present moment through our breath? A simple inhale to alert us and to bring our mind into focus and that simple exhale to drop us into this peaceful place. Amen. Alright.
Speaker 1:So today our sacred practice is pilgrimage. So quick disclaimer. I have never walked the Camino De Santiago, also known as the Way Of Saint James, that stretches across Europe and leads to a cathedral in Spain. The Camino is a big deal. It's one of the most iconic pilgrimages, and still, I don't even have plans to walk it.
Speaker 1:But that doesn't mean that pilgrimage is off limits for me or for you. I hope today you'll sense a bit of an invitation that is less complicated than planning for months and months or spending thousands of dollars and training your body to cover hundreds of kilometers on foot. But hey, if that's your jam, get after it. I know several people who have had their lives completely changed by the Camino. So walk on brother or sister.
Speaker 1:Today though, we will talk about different pilgrimages. You'll follow a memoir outline a bit like you did last week. So we'll talk about Iona, faith and Fatima, labyrinth and home. The closest I've come to a pilgrimage like the Camino was a trip that I took by myself to Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland way back in 2010. I call this bad crouching selfie with beautiful Iona Abbey in the background.
Speaker 1:I'm great at titles and clearly very good at selfies. Now Iona isn't just an island in the Hebrides, it is a sacred site. For three centuries on Iona, the abbey has been a center for Celtic Christianity. But the monastery was actually founded long before the abbey you can visit today. In May, the Irish monk, Columba, sailed there to live a quiet monastic life.
Speaker 1:Iona as we know it revitalized in the nineteen thirties by George MacLeod. He designed it to be an ecumenical community gathering folks from all walks of Christian life to explore, more integrated spirituality as well as follow the way of Jesus in justice and peace. Now until my dear friend Lisa introduced me to Iona, I don't remember hearing about it. But every time she would talk about her trips, something inside of me was like, yeah, I kinda wanna go there too. Pilgrimage is a transformative journey to a sacred site.
Speaker 1:Humans have been doing pilgrimage as long as we have been meaning making creatures. A cultural starting place for our understanding involves the Eleusinian mysteries, a secret religious cult in ancient Greece dedicated to the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. And the mysteries had this initiation ritual involving this sacred procession from Athens to the town of Eleusis, thought to go as far back as the fifteenth century BCE. In terms of a Christian spin on things, it's actually pretty interesting. In its earliest iteration, pilgrims journeyed to sites made holy by the life and death of Jesus.
Speaker 1:And one of the most famous Christian pilgrims was Helena, the mother of emperor Constantine. In March, she took a well documented pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was credited for finding and bringing back relics to Rome like pieces of the true cross and the nails of the crucifixion. And her journey became a model to imitate. And from there, pilgrimages really pop off in the middle ages around sacred sites to relics. The tomb of Saint James in Spain, relics of Mary Magdalene in France, the veil of the Virgin Mary at Chartres Cathedral.
Speaker 1:And you might think, that's nuts. How would a tattered bit of fabric or the bones of a dead guy make any difference to faith? Well, that's where we find this tension between what you see and what you hope for. In Hebrews 11, we're given one of the most familiar definitions of faith. Now faith is confidence of what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Speaker 1:This is what the ancients were commended for. Now when you think about faith, you might be of two minds. There is the objective idea of faith, what we would call our shared Christian faith. And there is the subjective idea of faith, what we would think of as our personal experience of the divine, as in my faith. And Hebrews is a letter meant to sound like a sermon, and the writer is concerned that these second generation community of Christians are beginning to fall away.
Speaker 1:So he's talking about both kinds. Stick with the faith that you share that holds you together and cultivate a personal faith in your soul. Only according to this verse, you can't really define much of that. Like, what a strange thing to be assured of what you do not see. And I kinda love that we are left with anything but a clear definition of faith here.
Speaker 1:It's kinda like you have to get up and go out and find something of faith for yourself. So on your way out the door to do that, the writer of Hebrews shoves you into a phone booth time machine like it's Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. And I'm not sorry for that 1989 Keanu Reeves movie reference. It's a classic classic from my adolescence. Plus, a time machine metaphor is not bad when you look through Hebrews 11 because you're taken back to the primeval history of Genesis one to 11 in the first section of that chapter, then you move through the Genesis stories of Abraham and the patriarchs in the middle section.
Speaker 1:By the way, no one is more a punk rock pilgrim than Abraham and Sarah. Hebrews eleven eight puts it like this. By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. But back to our time machine, the third section in chapter 11 takes us through the example of faith from Moses to the conquest or Exodus to Joshua. And over and over the writer uses the dative form of the noun faith.
Speaker 1:It shows up 18 times in the chapter. And this little bit of Greek grammar means that faith is the mode of everything. By faith they went. By faith they trusted. By faith they lived and died.
Speaker 1:The point is we are connected to all of these pilgrims of faith. We too are pilgrimage people. Sometimes, we get pilgrimage so right. When I went to Iona, I found what I was looking for and then some. I went looking for better ways to speak about God, and I found that there.
Speaker 1:I went looking for a new sense of something ancient and I sensed it in a thin place. A phrase I learned from Iona that means saints have mysteriously like worn down the earth praying so hard that you can't help but sense a little bit of heaven there too. I went looking for who I was becoming and I found that Bobby in the faces in the conversations, in the encounters with strangers along the way. But I have not always gotten it so right. I once made my good husband go with me to a very popular Merry Shrine in Fatima, Portugal.
Speaker 1:We rented a car and he drove me around a foreign country to make it happen. And while we were there, I felt nothing. Don't get me wrong, it was very cool to see, but I wasn't a part of the pilgrimage. I was just a tourist. I have the merry trinket, aww, to prove it.
Speaker 1:So how do you know? How do you know when you're on a divine quest or when you're just seeing the sights like everybody else? Well, wanna point you to a pilgrimage practice closer to home, the labyrinth. I'm not talking about the 1986 Jim Henson film starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, though truly one of my childhood favorites as freaky as it is. And the final dated movie reference I will throw your way today.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Back in the nineties, this woman, Lauren Archerus, repopularized the practice of labyrinths after visiting one at Chartres Cathedral in France. An Archerus describes a labyrinth like this. Each one has only one path and once we make the choice to enter it, the path becomes a metaphor for our journey through life, sending us to the center of the labyrinth and then back out to the edge on the same path. The labyrinth is a spiritual tool.
Speaker 1:In surrendering to the winding path, the soul finds healing and wholeness. Years ago, I actually led a labyrinth retreat here at common. Scott has since incorporated the labyrinth into the prayer apprentice course and Alexander's even done one in this room with the youth. So you might have some experience with this practice. Here are a couple of my favorite labyrinths in this city, people.
Speaker 1:More on them in a moment. The three things I love most about walking a labyrinth are first, that it is an embodied practice. This practice is a gift if you spend a little too much time in your head. A labyrinth beckons your whole body and it's done that for centuries. The truth is some form of a labyrinth has been a part of almost every culture and religion.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're even thinking about the myth of the minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. So I love how symbolic a labyrinth is. They're different from a maze which makes you choose which way to go. In a labyrinth, you only have one path. So once you enter you simply follow it to the center and back out again.
Speaker 1:You can think symbolically about the spiral nature of insight, the womb like quality of being held in God's presence, the chaos that is kept at bay while you make your journey through. And finally, a labyrinth is fun. It holds surprises. You never walk it the same way twice. It can both disorient and reorient you and everyone young and old believing or full of doubt can walk or wheel a labyrinth.
Speaker 1:I walk labyrinths as often as I can wherever I find one. I just did it yesterday. I've walked them on Bowen Island, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, at Land's End by Golden Gate Park. I've walked labyrinths in Chicago, Parksville, out at UBC. Right here in the city, you can walk a labyrinth at Knows Hill, in Silver Springs, out at Kingsfold, or my two favorites, Christ Church Anglican in Elbow Park or FCJ Center in Mission, not that far from us.
Speaker 1:All you need to do to walk a labyrinth is take a breath before you start and then step into it. You can also begin with a question, I did that yesterday, or follow these three simple prompts. Release, receive, return. Release on your way in what burden you carry with you to the center. Receive something in your spirit when you get to the middle and return with what you've learned along the way.
Speaker 1:Now there is this temptation I have to make the point here that well, maybe all of life is a pilgrimage. And there is biblical precedent for that. In Hebrews, the writer tells Christ followers that they journey through life as strangers and foreigners. Like everyone before them, they are seeking a homeland. But still, I think something more paradoxical is true.
Speaker 1:That everything is and is not a pilgrimage. I mean, most of the time, you're just going about your day. You're not journeying to a sacred site, the place of a saint's femur or the site of the hill where the Virgin Mary appeared out of nowhere. Most of the time you're just driving to work, you're biking around town with your kids, you're taking trips only to be delayed at the airport when you're coming and when you're going. And I think pilgrimage does take a little more work, a little more rigor, a little more intention than just living through the day to day.
Speaker 1:But I gotta tell you at the same time, some of my favorite pilgrimages are the ones I didn't know I was on. Like, when I was riding the subway in New York City and got into a conversation late at night with a fellow tourist. And we laughed and we joked and he missed his stop. Only when he went to get off one stop later he bent down and kissed me so lightly on the cheek. And he said, you, my dear, are lovely.
Speaker 1:And then he was gone. It was so ordinary and extraordinary. It was sacred and hardly special. It really shouldn't have happened, but it changed my life. Or another time, when I was standing in front of a Kandinsky painting at the Art Institute of Chicago listening to Bon Iver in my earbuds, and I was so sure, like, all of a sudden that everything wonderful was right there in that moment as I stared and stayed with something beautiful while my husband who loved me wandered the museum on his own.
Speaker 1:Some of my favorite pilgrimages are the ones I never meant to go on. Hebrews 12 is our landing place today, What I'm gonna call our final word for pilgrimage. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith for the joy set before him. He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Now it's not hard to pick up on the movement metaphor or the athlete metaphor for faith here.
Speaker 1:Write off, it's a team sport. You run this kind of marathon in a pack. And speaking of pack, don't overdo it. Don't pack your life with so much stuff that doesn't even matter. Stay light like a pilgrim.
Speaker 1:That means keep short accounts. Try not to accumulate so much stuff. Be about the process of forgiveness. Get granular about self examination and take good care of that blessed body of yours because faith is a long haul journey. You will need to persevere through many seasons and you don't even have to make it up as you go put one foot in front of the other on the path that stretches out before you.
Speaker 1:I like how one writer says Jesus is the ground of faith's possibility because that's it. That's your model. Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith who released divinity, who received humanity at his center, and who returned to God like we all will one day too. So yes, I think you should plan and practice intentional pilgrimage to sites that are holy to others or just straight up holy to you. You can walk the Camino or take a ferry to a Celtic island or bike over to a labyrinth close to where you live.
Speaker 1:But you should also be open to the moments, maybe you only get like a handful in a lifetime, where you are moving about the world and something surprising catches you up in awe. You can set out on a pilgrimage or trust that someday when you aren't even trying a pilgrimage will rise up to meet you right under your own feet. Jesus is that big and that present in everything blessing your efforts to meet him in an ancient story and practice and then out of nowhere plopping a gentle kiss right on your cheek. In the practice of pilgrimage, all you need to do is to stay on the path. And like the writer of Hebrews reminds us, that path will always bring you home.
Speaker 1:Let us pray. Loving God, we pause before we launch into the rest of our day. We consider how the practice of moving about in the world with care and wonder, expectation and hope might lead us to a sacred site of holy encounter. Jesus, we think about how you moved about the world encountering people, places, histories, longings, tensions, and needs, and you always left them better, more healed, more whole, more free. Through you, we see what is true, that every step we take falls on holy ground.
Speaker 1:So spirit of the living God, present with us now enter the places of our hurt and our longing and heal us of all that harms us. Amen. I've never actually mentioned this before, but that spirit of the living God prayer is one I've adapted for years from the Iona community.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website commons.church for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.