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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 dot church for more information today we are logging back into this conversation that we are having about the holy spirit which if we're honest is really just an exploration of what we mean of what we say when we're talking about god as jeremy referenced in week one a christian imagination sees god as trinity as a divine community as an endless dance of gift
and reception father son spirit source savior and storyteller and christians have formed these images because of what we see in scripture of who god is and how god acts and what god says showing us that imagination just might be the most significant spiritual practice that we have at our disposal i mean think about it this way the scriptures present the divine through a series of striking literary forms but those are forms that the church continues to journey with and grapple with
and create with as we compose new and brilliant words and songs and art and justice to make the world better which is just another way of acknowledging that the title of this series forgotten god it's a reminder to not neglect our imagination of god to not push the idea of a creative and sustaining force behind all things into the background of our lives to never stop picturing god or conceiving god because the holy spirit is a kind of muse for the art of living that we
compose each and every day i think and i have loved the practical ways that this series has stretched my thinking so far in part because i found it really helpful to think of faith less as a noun less like a briefcase that i carry because i mean let's be honest nobody carries briefcases anymore right the point is is that i like imagining faith as something that i do like exercise like art like intimacy all of these practices that require and develop transformation in me
as i do them and i have loved thinking about the holy spirit how this idea has these practical implications for this work and i'm still bawling over this idea from last week that to find and to listen to the most gentle voice i can hear there under all of the noise and all of the chaos and all of the criticism to hear that gentle voice is to hear the same spirit that stirred over and through and out of the cosmos before all things to hear that voice is to hear the sound
of easter morning which coincidentally is the same sound we all make when we wake up as we take a breath in and we breathe it out to hear that voice is to encounter the divine in all of its wondrous mystery and today we are going to take another tentative step down this road of encounter together and as we do i'm gonna invite you for just a moment here to send ourselves let's pray together now god of all all creation that flourishes and of the universe that continues to expand away from us
all of our human experience and our memory and our hoped four days all of our energy and our breath and each heartbeat ringing now we pause and we choose to maybe shift our attention from all that aches and all the distracts and from all the things that we bring with us we carry today and we turn in whatever way we can toward you asking that you would help us in the mystery of grace to be holy here and to be truly with each other to turn our eyes with kindness to your
presence that we can see in those around us and maybe we can feel in our fragile hearts and bodies too we pray that you give us strength to receive the grace of shared welcome and warmth your spirit leading us now even as we take up ancient words trusting that ever and always you make them new we pray this in the name of christ our hope amen okay so today we're going to dive into a little bit this idea of spirit and community and to do that we need to talk through
imminence and real time and what seems good because in part what we're going to do is wade through a well-established theological relationship between the ideas we have about the holy spirit and our ideas of the church see the christian scriptures offer a clear picture of how jesus's earliest friends and followers drew a direct connection between the idea of god as spirit and their identity as a community pulled together and animated by the spirit and when we look at the book of acts
which we're going to spend some time in together today we see the earliest christians forming communities around the message of jesus and this is a message that they told again and again in personal accounts of transformation examples like peter and paul and uh stephen that's the other one that i was thinking of point is this is that i don't think it's right for us to talk about spirit without telling stories and seeing as i'm in the spot today i guess it's my turn right
see because like jeremy my earliest faith was shaped by a tradition of christian practice and spirituality that hadn't forgotten god as spirit in fact spirit was their main selling point my earliest imagination of god was shaped by pentecostal christians and communities that talked about the book of acts as though it was still happening and i experienced this dynamism in the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of the churches that i was taken to i experienced it in the authentic
emotive liturgy that was for the most part more genuine than coercive where sorrow and joy alike were led out into the world as part of communal life sometimes people would cry openly sometimes they would shout in celebration and all the time the spirit was regularly referred to as the source of what was shared and this left many including me feeling like i belonged to something that seemed spontaneously alive and growing and accessible to everybody and you know what to this day i'm still
okay with most of that because i've come to see how it formed a strong sense in me of what theologians refer to as divine imminence this sense that while god is transcendent beyond us as creator and other and source of all god is also around and mysteriously present and maybe maybe god is good jump ahead to my early 20s where as an undergrad student carrying all my angst and my questions alongside of these religious memories and i found myself standing in a small
monastery chapel on a greek island listening to two orthodox monks seeing the vespers service in a language that i couldn't understand and late afternoon light is waning and incense is billowing and filling the air and i could feel that same imminent presence from my childhood in the priest's cadence and their melody aware that somehow i belonged there even though i clearly didn't feeling something unfamiliar and yet somehow commonly held in the shaping of sacred space and time
and that's just a snapshot of how i've sensed the spirit in these kind of imminent moments and christian tradition teaches us all that regardless of how connected we feel to this tradition it's so important to look for and name our own moments like this because individual experiences have always been vital to the story of faith perhaps and even most especially if you have had different experiences than me because some of us sense the spirit in quiet reverence
some of us in emotive and an expressive liturgy some of us find it in the plural pronouns of the creeds that invite us to say even when we don't know we can we believe and i'm not so sure that these kinds of experiences are exclusive to our religious community encounters because i think that probably here today there are some of us who have sensed spirit in the shared work of a justice cause or a local community council that might be dysfunctional but it gets the job done
or in a neighborhood gardening project some of us in the playful laughter of our closest friends are in their holding of our deepest sorrow because i really do think that divine eminence is refound in and through those around us the spirit at work and all the moments and places and places that we choose each other now people have noted this communal aspect of human experience renowned social theorist emil durkheim is just one of them he coins this term collective effervescence to describe the
kind of enchanting encounters that he observed in rural tribal groups that he studied and that term has actually been applied to all kinds of other groups in a recent new york times article psychologist adam grant suggested that these kinds of effervescent experiences where we feel like we're syncing with a group of people just think like live performances or sporting events or celebratory gatherings like convocations and weddings but this is what we've been missing out
on these past two years with social distance restrictions in play because that sense of being connected with others isn't something that you can get by binging episodes that are trending now or watching a video that has 34 million views or even talking about bruno which anybody else in the room watched in kanto six times in the last week anyways here we go grant suggests that we are at a loss because of the way that groups can impact our emotions sometimes for the better
exemplified in such facts as you being five times more likely to laugh with other people than by yourself and that might all be true but it's not really what i'm getting at because i'm not suggesting that every group we're part of makes room for spirit or helps us to be aware of the spirit's nearness i'm more intrigued today by how the christian theology of spirit might help us in the work of community i'm curious how practical this theology can be and to find some hints i want to
look quickly at a couple stories from the book of acts because that whole book focuses on how the spirit sparked and sustained the early christian communities okay so the first story is in acts 10.
and here we see the apostle peter who is one of jesus's most faithful followers we see him on the mediterranean coast he's chilling for a few days i guess and he has this dreamlike vision while he's napping on the roof one day where he sees a sheet descend from heaven and it's holding a bunch of animals that were considered impure and unfit to eat by jewish dietary standards and in this trance he's having he hears a divine voice tell him to get up and to eat one of these animals which
he adamantly refuses because he is an observant jew but this voice speaks to him again do not call anything impure that god has made clean and the vision ends and then we jump into the story ahead to the next day we find peter in the house of a gentile somebody who isn't jewish a roman centurion named cornelius and he's there with his family and his servants and we learn that cornelius is aware of the jewish god that he's devout and faithful in his religious observance and
i love it because as peter and cornelius start talking peter is clearly still working through this weird vision that he had the day before because he tells the group he says look you guys are probably aware that jewish law doesn't really allow me to be here and visit with you which is super awkward right telling your friends that you're not supposed to be there but then he says this he says but god has shown me that i shouldn't call anyone impure or unclean and then a little later
after learning some more of cornelius's story he continues he says this i now realize how true it is that god does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears god and does what is right there's a couple interesting things here first the greek noun that describes god as not picking favorites prosopolemtes besides being a great tongue twister it's built on the noun prosopa which refers to the masks that actors wore in ancient greco-roman theater performances
and by using this word peter's making this profound observation for him and for us that the divine doesn't play favorites with the masks of socioeconomic status or hierarchy or power that we don during our day to day god doesn't play favorites with the masks of culture or gender or purity that are imposed on our bodies and others as well the second thing to note here too though is that peter seems to be coming to these conclusions in the moment these shifts of perspective happening
with a kind of surreal slow motion pan across the room because yeah he had had a vision but now he's standing in the room with real gentiles and he's trading stories of god's goodness with those that he had always been taught to avoid those he assumed were outsiders and the text tells us that while he's still talking to them the spirit comes upon everybody in the house jews and gentiles alike swept up in this ecstatic communal experience of grace that's so profound that peter
immediately baptizes cornelius and the entire house and the tremors of this boundary lifting event shot out into the early christian community and we're going to talk more about that in a second because before we move on i want to say that i think there's something here for every single one of us who's ever changed our minds when we realized that an idea or a system was impacting some other people those of us who have ever moved like peter from one position to another sometimes
at greater cost than we thought we would have to pay some of us who have found our perspective shifting as we learn and we really start to see the raw humanity of another person or another group and that's this realization that the voice inviting you to open your heart in forgiveness or in acceptance that little intuition you sometimes have that keeps you curious about another person's experience underneath their mask that they try to keep on that quiet whisper that nudges you
for your own good or someone else's it nudges you from opinions or from boundaries that used to feel so non-negotiable that voice is always the spirit teaching you to trust in real time embodied experiences that are moving you towards god's best now to be clear these boundary bending events in acts 10 and in our lives they those ones are next hands they were really hard for early christian communities because many of them were trying to form across this ethnic divide
of gentiles and jews across the separations of social rank and status and as we move in the story ahead five chapters in acts 15 we get this curious look at how they did this work at this point in the story some time has passed since peter has been in cornelius house and in the intervening period the apostle paul has come on to the scene paul who was a defender and a teacher of the jewish law he had become a follower of jesus through a series of startling events but
because he had been pretty mean to early christians he kind of had to go quiet go off grid for a while only to emerge more than a decade later with a bunch of ideas about jesus and the desire to tell the gentile world about them which is what him and his associates start to do and eventually they go to jerusalem to share what's been happening in the christian communities across the mediterranean and unsurprisingly there's some diversity in the community and not everybody agrees with his method
and his message in fact some of the early christians who were also pharisees really buckled down on this idea that male gentile converts had to be circumcised like all observant jews they had to obey jewish law in all of its entirety in order to join christian churches so the apostles and the elders they have this meeting they hear from and they listen to many individuals they have an extended discussion the text says which i think just means it went far too long
and james says this james is jesus's brother he's the leader of the jerusalem church he stands up at the end of this gathering and he says it is my judgment therefore that we should not make it difficult for gentiles who are turning to god let's write a letter he goes on that can be distributed to all kinds of places and so that's what they do they write to the gentile believers in antioch syria and silesia it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything
beyond the following requirements you are to abstain from food sacrifice to idols from blood from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality you will do well to avoid these things farewell it's very it's very formal unless i sort of chuckle because this seems like such a random list right these instructions just sort of cobbled together but here's the deal you may not be able to see this but these instructions are basic in that they encourage gentile believers to stay away
from the rituals of civic in imperial temples practices that often reinforced strict social role descriptions and exploitative power dynamics which were things that didn't align with how jesus's followers were attempting to build community across the divides of ethnicity and across the divides of gender and across the divides of status which is great but i want to focus in on that interesting line it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us because that seems a little haphazard right
like these are major decisions that shape the christian story and it sounds like ax is saying that the church expanded because of a boardroom decision where a bunch of guys just sort of rolled the dice and went with their gut except i don't know if that's how we should read it what's curious is that the greek verb which is translated here as it seemed good it has all these other adjacent meanings things like to think or to suppose or my favorite to imagine and taken that way it's easy for me to
see what the author of acts was going for here it's easier for me to get my head around their theology of the holy spirit because this is actually a lovely practical theology for how the spirit shapes good community spirit shapes it through people committed to working through complex issues people committed to hearing one another's perspective people building a healthy sense of consensus people who are committed to not making things difficult for each other and you know what
the thing i love most that it's so easy to forget that this decision and this language that they come up with it came after years years of cultivating distance or difference it came after years of listening to each other it came after years of coming to the same table years of allowing christians of different stripes to tell their stories shaping a theology that believed the spirit was the spark of social change that jesus had dreamed of but then also a theology that trusted the spirit as
the source of the holy patience they needed for themselves and for others because real change is hard and it seems so long in coming and in that light their open and creative language of it seemed to us isn't casual at all it's not arrived at without grit and tenacity instead we can see it as the product of a group that had let go of faith as a thing to be owned and possessed and wielded a community that had accepted truth as something to be found over and over again together spirit as their
guide spirit as our guide to as you make us better by humbly sharing your story and pursuing your wisdom and naming what you see as you listen with radical bravery and generosity at times joining together in our desire here at commons to become a community that offers more diverse voices in more diverse places and as we welcome and we embrace each other here and in a bunch of spaces in this community making connection less difficult for those left out labeled different or overlooked imagining
with all of the creativity we can muster a way toward life that seems good let us pray loving god perhaps in this moment we're so to find ourselves with images that come to mind of the life that we lead the ways in which you have stepped close to us in the presence of meaningful connection your great imminent presence in the world an adjoining sort of knock on the door of our life day after day in good friendships and meaningful connections and intimacy and today we want to name that we also
want to name our for some of us the great longing we have for that we ask that you give us courage to live in the world as we seek it we thank you too for the gift of community that helps us to see and rediscover your presence day after day week after week and we ask that you would give us courage to trust the way that you always change our lives in real time with people who are different with people who ask and call us towards difference where ideas and convictions that can seem so hard
and we hold them so tightly with those things fade and loosen in the light of grace that invites us into newness and to flourishing and we pray too would you guide us as we commit ourselves to doing what we feel is best with your tender presence guiding us in the name of christ we pray amen you