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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 good morning thanks for being here come on back in and have a seat today we're going to start a new conversation we've got four weeks to talk about trinity and holy spirit and the nature of god so look out lots to cover here first though let's recap where we've been to start the year we just finished a series called
relearning friendship and that was fun because scott and bobby and i all had a chance to add our voices into that conversation that was intentional we figured if we were going to talk about friendship we needed to hear from each other in that but we covered a number of different ideas in that series the idea that friendship is a unique category in our lives one that we need to guard and protect and celebrate the rarity of we talked about loneliness and expectation we talked about suffering
and the way that we can join each other in those difficult experiences and then last week we talked about conflict in friendship in particular how difficult it can be to balance healthy good boundaries with also making space for disagreement with those who care about us and sometimes we need to make hard decisions about relationships and even friendships those that are not healthy for us but at the same time we don't want hard decisions to make us hard people in fact the reason for good
boundaries in your life is that you want to be able to stay soft and vulnerable and open to intimacy with the relationships that earn that from you you're actually protecting your open heart by keeping good boundaries i actually posted a follow-up to our youtube channel this week looking at some of the conflict strategies that can be helpful in relationships some of the ones that rachel and i infused in our marriage if you're interested in that it's available as a resource for you on
youtube of course that whole series is available in the archives if you missed any of it so check that out today though we begin the forgotten god no my name is jeremy i'm part of the team here at commons and thanks for being here uh whether you are in the room or online today we really appreciate your presence with us we know we couldn't do any of this without you but in this new series we want to take some time to talk about the presence of a spirit in all of our lives
now obviously we haven't forgotten about god right this is a church after all and all of us got up and prepared ourselves to be part of this worship gathering i mean we are here specifically because we remember god at some level and yet particularly in a church like commons i think where we have intentionally created space for an intellectual pursuit when it comes to our faith it can feel at times like spirit is secondary maybe not forgotten but perhaps asked to
stand just to the side a little bit and i'll admit some of that is my own story in my own baggage i made my way to the jesus story through the pentecostal tradition in fact i did my undergrad at a pentecostal bible college and before starting comments i worked in and i was ordained in pentecostal churches and that charismatic spirit-filled experience was a big part of my formative christian journey now over time some of the gaps in my experience became more evident to me
i went to grad school and i read more widely i started to understand that the christianity was this long and wide river with a lot of different streams flowing into it and hear me here it's okay to understand your stream and where you feel most at home actually that's an important part of all of our stories but for me making christianity mine was also learning to value and embrace these traditions that i had not been exposed to i hear a commons we work hard to
incorporate prayers and imagery from across the christian perspective to remind us of just how big god is but then i also began to see how at times those ecstatic experiences of worship that i had been a part of had been used to manipulate my emotions and perspectives and certainly not always intentionally but even unintentionally there's incredible power in communal experience and sometimes it can be very hard to figure out what is spirit and what is group think in some of those moments
i still remember being in camp meetings at 18 years old when i was new to christianity and everybody there was speaking in tongues and there was a lot of pressure about participating in that and i did only to be left wondering the next day whether any of that was real so i remember resolving very early in my career as a minister that pressure and coercion were never going to be part of my repertoire as a pastor and that goes for spirit but it goes for money it goes for salvation
i firmly believe that god is gentle with all of us and yet still i recognize that i was deeply shaped by encounters with spirit profound experiences of prayer and worship that i didn't want to shake and so when we were formulating our values at commons jesus at the center that's what we started with we always had the conviction that jesus would be the lens through which we interpreted scripture together but the language that we added of intellectually honest and spiritually
passionate that was an attempt however clumsy for us to marry a critical academic investigation of faith with the trust that god still does show up in unexpected ways for all of us and so as a community we've tried to balance those ideas but i think it's fair to admit that oftentimes the power and the presence of spirit in our lives can sometimes be relegated behind our intellectual pursuit at least it can for me and i'll admit one series of conversations is not going to fix all of
that and awareness of divine presence is something that each of us has to cultivate daily but one series of conversations certainly isn't going to hurt so let's start there so today we're going to talk about trinity what is the nature of god and what do we mean when we talk about god's threeness next week we'll talk about god's spirit in and through us in the world we'll talk about conviction and conscience as spirit guides us in community and finally we'll look at
spirit as a feminine image and metaphor for god sometimes when we take biblical metaphors for god and to tightly anthropomorphize them we can squeeze out other important vital images to the edges and we want to do some work in this series to reclaim some of that territory in our imagination so that's lots to cover but hopefully this will be fun and let's start together with a prayer god we come today confident in the presence of your spirit here with us and even when we lack the language or
understanding of exactly how we trust that you are near and so this day as we speak together of spirit as we remind each other of your being in and with us we ask that you would move that conversation not just through our intellect but somehow deep into our being we long to be fully present to you our minds and our hearts and our bodies but also somehow our spirits entwined with the divine and so for those of us who tend to live in the world of the mind we thank you
for that unique expression of who we are how it brings us closer to knowing you we celebrate intellect and thoughtfulness and how you've wired us but we ask that in these moments you would expand our imagination of grace if we have heard your voice before sensed your nearness with us and yet struggled sometimes to offer ourselves and healthy life-giving ways we ask for peace to come [Music] flood our minds and calm anxieties to invite us to discover you in surprising moments help us discern
between excitement and emotion and you but also to embrace this full spectrum of what it means to be human in our ecstatic joy and crushing pain in whatever way we need your spirit today we trust that you will meet us and heal us and enliven us with spirit's breath in the strong name of the risen christ we pray amen okay the agenda today is trinity and it's going to look like this we're going to talk about communal experience and the point of doctrine dancing around
and what is it that is underneath our language but even to try to talk about trinity is kind of absurd one of my favorite sayings of the church from an author that is long since forgotten is that we must speak of god is three in one but to speak of trinity for more than a minute means we will inevitably slip into heresy because we probe too deeply the mysteries of god now that does not bode well at the start of a 30-minute sermon but i still i like that quote because some things are simply
mysterious and so today we're not going to try to parse the doctrine of trinity i'm really not interested in gatekeeping theological spats but i do want to talk about why trinity is so important to my concept of the divine and i think from there that can give us a starting point for the rest of the series to focus in on the person of spirit within that same triune god first though as an entry point i want to talk about buzzfeed in particular an article that they
posted last week about a collection of different prayer websites two in particular that they listed pray.com and hallow.com these are sites that are set up so you can go and post your prayers and theoretically someone will then pray for you and that's not bad we have a prayer tab on commons.life and we do collect those prayers and we do pass them to a prayer team so that's cool but this article was about the incredible amount of venture capital that was flowing into these sites
40 million dollars in one investment and that is not because venture capitalists love prayer it's because they love data you see these sites have a large user base they are free after all but prayer represents some uniquely valuable information about you i mean it might be nice to know what you ate for lunch but imagine if advertisers knew what you were praying for and that's what these sites are selling now to be clear the investigation showed that these sites have privacy policies that say the
contents of your prayer will not be sold to third parties but the way they get around that is by creating different categories and forums to post your prayers in and then by combining that with your age and location data they can mine a lot of information about you so say you post a prayer in the marriage category and then all of a sudden you see an ad for a divorce lawyer on facebook or a new marriage book from an author whose instagram post you liked once that's where it's coming from so first
super shady the second i think it also kind of reveals what's broken in our conceptualization of prayer to begin with now obviously i don't know everyone's motivation here i don't have the data mining capability to understand all that but i would guess that at least part of the appeal behind these sites is the idea that to get your prayers answered the best way to do it is to get as many people as possible praying for you and that's a very subtle but also a very
capitalist perspective that has worked its way into our imagination of god and it's something that you see a lot of if i want god to do what i want god to do the way to twist god's arm is to get a lot of prayer capital behind me and that is fundamentally a misshapen imagination a prayer is not a tool for us to shape god's work in the world as much as it is a tool that works reflexively on us now when jesus teaches us to pray in the lord's prayer which we've recited today
it's all about how our reflection and our intention can align our desire and our action with god's heart prayer is not to change god it is meant to change you okay but then what about something like healing should we pray for that well absolutely we should right in james we read is anyone among you sick let them call the elders of the church to pray over them anoint them with oil in the name of the lord the prayer offered in faith will make the person well the lord will raise them up and if they
have sinned they will be forgiven therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective so should we pray for each other yes shall we pray for healing yes should we trust that god's spirit is at work in the world of course absolutely but there is a lot more going on here than just getting what we want from god first of all this idea james has of being made well that's literally the word for salvation
that he uses and he makes that clear by tying it into the idea of being forgiven when we pray for each other so this is actually isn't just about healing this isn't just about having our prayers answered the way that we want this is actually rooted in the hebrew idea of shalom being made well and at peace the embodiment of human flourishing in the world now absolutely our physical health is part of that and james is acknowledging that but he's also expanding it at the same time
this last phrase in the niv it says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective but i mean that's just wrong the word powerful is ironically something more like effective it actually means it accomplishes a great deal and then the word effective is the word inergo except that's an adjectival participle that modifies the word prayer all that means is that the sentence should read something more like the working prayers of the righteous accomplish much in other words
james is saying if you are sick come to the community for prayer because yeah we believe that god is active in the world and you might be healed but actually the prayers of the community will do more for you than you expect and so when you post your prayers online you end up with your data monetized by capital investment firms and when you go to community to those who know and care about you and you open yourself up to them not just with your needs but with your hurts and
your failings and you trust that you will be loved and cared for known in the midst of that vulnerable moment you might be healed but you will be made well and again the point of prayer isn't to manipulate god it's that we might be transformed by god's imagination for us and part of what james is arguing here is that healing is a gift but it's the very experience of beloved community that we fall into when we open ourselves up to each other for prayer that's what we need because that is shalom
which means that this is being made well because we are experiencing the kind of generative community that god has always known within god's self so yeah we pray to be healed but more than that what we trust is that in shared community we are invited into the healing wellness the presence of the divine and in that we are made well because we experience the love that god is you see when we say that god is love we mean a lot more than god is loving or even that god loves us what we mean
is that god is an endless dance of gift and reception give and take love alive from before there was time and that means that god has never been alone god has never felt on their own and so of course god's love for us would primarily take shape in the world in the ways that we embrace each other with that kind of community human flourishing healing wellness at the end of the day it is modeled on the shape of god and this right here is actually why discussions of trinity are so important to
christianity that's why we wrestle with our language and our dogma so intently but it's not about gatekeeping or at least it shouldn't be because at the end of the day trinitarian theology is not about getting god right it's more about making sure we don't miss out on any of the beauty of god so here's an example of how that plays out theologically there's an old heresy called modalism and the best metaphor for this might be to say that god is like water water can be a liquid and if you freeze
it god can be a solid and if you boil it it can be a vapor so that's three molecules in three different realities just like the triune god and that works except technically it's heresy because it assumes that god only acts or seems or appears in three different ways but isn't really triune now is anyone ever going to be less loved by god for finding the metaphor of water helpful or even using it in a sermon no absolutely not that's not the point of our doctrine what we're trying to protect with
doctrine is the idea that god actually is somehow a divine community of gift and reception persons in relationship not just in appearance and that the nature of everything what the universe is composed of is shared communal love now hear me the point of doctrine is not to decide who is right and who is wrong who's in and who's out and i know it gets used as a weapon for that a lot and i'm sorry but the point of our theology our language and our doctrine is always
simply to guide us steadily and gently back toward the beauty of god that welcomes all and yeah sometimes we need to be pulled back in and sometimes we need to let go of overly simplistic images and narratives about god that's what theology does for us but particularly when it comes to trinity doctrine should do anything but close down our imagination it should only ever open us up to the expansive grace of the one god that is loving community god is the singular source of all that is good
and god is an eternal dance of gift and reception from before there was time that's what we mean when we say trinity in fact that's where the genesis of the idea of trinity comes from that trinity is not an explicitly biblical idea it's the product of biblical reflection so tertullian was an african theologian that lived in the late second century he was the first christian to use the latin term trinity to describe god and then a couple centuries later gregory of nazianzis one of the
cappadocian fathers an eastern theologian from what today is known as turkey gave us the first orthodox image of the trinity he coined the term perichoresis now he's using the greek language here but the prefix peri means around as in perimeter or the measure around a circle and choreo is the verb to dance as in choreography so the first orthodox image of the transcendent god so we have an imminent god that we see in history right that's goddess creator and
redeemer and sustainer or father son and spirit all those images we are very familiar with the god that we know but the first image of the orthodox transcendent god who god is in god's self is literally the eternal dancing around that's it that's what we have and that right there is why spirit is so important to keep in mind as we point our imagination back toward god because images as father and son are beautiful they're so important to christianity they help us imagine god is
close incomprehensible and jesus has an embodied image of god's way in the world guides us through our lives but at the same time if we let them very particular images of the divine can also close down our imagination far too quickly god is like a human god is like a man god is like a particular man that i've known in my life and it's at that point that spirit swoops in to lift our thinking back up to the transcendent divine that we can barely name the eternal dancing that formed the
world in all of its complex and beautiful diversity see the point of spirit in our theology is to bring us back to a pre-rational sub-linguistic experience of the goodness that flows through everything we encounter i've been reading oprah's new book that oprah not the other one it's called what happened to you conversations on trauma resilience and healing it's fantastic you should check it out but it's written by oprah winfrey and dr bruce perry who is a psychiatrist
specializing in childhood trauma and neuroplasticity but the book is about helping us to understand the ways in which our experiences particularly traumatic experiences hardwire themselves into our brains the central premise is that far too often we ask what's wrong with us instead of what happened to us and for someone who has lived an incredibly privileged life it's been eye-opening for me to see just how much of what i take for granted in the world has been a profound gift i was given
but what i'm fascinated with today is the way that dr perry explains how the first two years of our lives even our experience in the womb shape our perceptions of the world as parents i think we're more aware of this today but still sometimes we have this idea that we can hide things from our kids until they have language to talk about it or understand it like we can argue in front of them or we can be frustrated near them or we can even ignore an infant or a toddler for a
time because they don't really understand what's happening but dr perry argues that actually language is what helps us rationalize our experiences and it's part of what gives us a defense to those types of experiences pre-linguistic children very young children though they are entirely at the mercy of those experiences all they have is emotion all they have is intuition all they have is touch and safety and care and concern and tone and texture and timing to shape their perception
so he argues that it's those sub-rational pre-linguistic assumptions about the world that most deeply shape who we become in the world now as a parent with a two-year-old that's a lot of pressure and i feel that but also it's an incredible invitation to us both to rachel and i as partners in raising our kids to see the best in themselves and assume the good that's in the world around them but also to learn to welcome this knowledge as an invitation to remind myself
that it's actually my pre-rational experience of the divine the ways that i learn to give myself over to worship and welcome the ways i learned to assume god's love surrounding me always the moments when i set aside my intellect and my theology to swim in divine goodness that these are actually the most formative moments of my life not the work that i do to study and research and write a lot of sermons in other words the experiences of god that i allow myself to have that will shape my
theology not the other way around or as frederick buchner once wrote a common view is that life itself whatever life is does not care one way or another any more than the ocean cares about whether we swim or drown and in all honesty and has to admit that a great deal of the evidence supports such a view but rightly or wrongly the christian faith flatly contradicts this to say that god is spirit is to say that life does care that the life-giving power that life itself comes from is not
indifferent as to whether we sing it wants us to swim and my hope is that as we begin a series of conversations about this forgotten god spirit that exists beneath every moment of our lives that we would be able to remember that the god we grasp at with incomplete language and theology is always for us and that the more deeply that conviction can undergird our thoughts and theology and doctrine the more effectively that god can transform our experience of god's world
may the eternal dance of gift and reception go with you this week may you inhale divine love and then breathe out anything that happened to so doubt in your embrace this week the triune god that sits the center of our faith but also at the foundation of our experience of the world he shared communal love from before there was time extended now to us and through us let's pray three in one god who has always existed as shared love a dance of gift and reception give and take a breath in and out
may we understand that below our language and theology sits this realization that the universe is founded in shared love and that our thinking our theology our scriptures our encounters with jesus are based on that truth they are pre-rational experience of you that we feel somewhere deep in the core of our being in our bones and we allow that to become the experience that shapes everything we see when we talk with a person when we imagine ourselves when we move the world pushing toward
the kingdom and imagination you have for all of us may who you are before language before time before theology always guide us into love in the strong name of the risen christ we pray amen