Teaching | Share Joys and Sorrows | Community E02

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If you'd like to join the circle, we'd love to send you this Christmas gift to thank you. Learn more at practicingtheway.org. and welcome to the John Mark Coleman Teachings Podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space. It's great to have you with us. We're continuing our community series.

learning how to live with depth and intentionality in a world marked by superficiality and isolation. This week, John Mark unpacks how sharing the highs and lows of our lives Our joys and sorrows can transform ordinary table time into sacred communion and help us grow into people of love. Here's John Mark.

Good morning. Great to see you all. Hey, before you sit down, turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 14 and stand back up with me for the reading of Scripture. Mark chapter 14. We stand to honor the text that we are about to read as more than just an ancient biography about a beautiful and true historical figure named Jesus.

little village called the Nazareth, but as something much more. Let me just give you a moment of quiet to open your heart to receive all that God would speak into the depth of your being today. Come, Holy Spirit. Our reading for this morning is from Mark chapter 14. Let's begin in verse 22. While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take it.

This is my body. Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, he said to them. Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Look down at verse 32.

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, sit here while I pray. But he took Peter, James, and John along with them, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, he said to them. Stay here and keep watch. Take a seat.

Last night, I sat around the table with my family and a few close friends for our weekly Sabbath feast. I was coming off a kind of emotionally exhausting week. I got that bug that is going around. If you have it as well, just turn to your neighbor and cough. I was under a pretty tight work deadline that was all-consuming. And on top of it, there was some family drama. So basically just real life.

We sat down and we have a little liturgy we pray through on Sabbath evenings. And we gave thanks and we began to eat. And the food was really good, but it was not like Michelin star. It was just like a good dinner. The conversation was really good too, but it was not like riveting, like intellectual debate. It was just... Like nice family conversation around the table. There was plenty of laughter and a lot of love.

And you know, eating dinner with my family and community last night did not solve a single one of my problems. I woke up this morning with the same set of problems and anxieties that I woke up with yesterday. Actually, we picked up a few new ones yesterday because my college son was home, so you know. But... you know what it did do? It put me in touch with joy.

With this sense that I'm not alone. I have a family and a community around me. I'm not just an island out in that storm-tossed sea. And it put me in touch with the goodness. of ordinary life, something as simple as sourdough bread or as a sunset or eating outside in November because we live in California. Do you realize what a miracle that is? If you grew up here, it's just ruined on you, you know?

glass of wine with the gift of a child or a spouse or a friend or a long-term relationship. The miracle, the sheer wonder of ordinary life where all is grace. It made me think of Dr. Robert Lustig's book, The Hacking of the American Mind, which is essentially about how modern corporations have capitalized, and that's the right word, our brain's primal dopamine system, causing us to confuse pleasure with happiness.

chemical language, dopamine with serotonin. Lustig argues that peak human happiness, the happiest human beings pretty much ever are, is when we are sitting around a table sharing a meal with people we love and are loved by. At the end of the book, he argues, really the only way to improve on this level of happiness is to eat the meal outside, which is good news for those of us in Southern California.

We left off together with the table. I pray you had a chance over the last week or two to share a meal with your community. That's our baseline for the next month. As simple as it is, this practice just... eating a meal with brothers and sisters who follow Jesus, with the smaller subset of the group in this room, as a family, this is one of the most simple yet powerful demonstrations I know of, of the kingdom of God.

This morning, our plan is to go a bit deeper into what happens around the table. We are working through five key skills for living in community. They are be family around the table. experience formation in relationships, share your joys and sorrows, confess your sins, and stay together to grow. Up next is share your joys and sorrows. Because when we...

sit down to eat together at the table, the challenge we face is how do we let our meal not just devolve into dinner with friends? The controversial comedian Aziz Ansari once made a joke that millennials have added a decade-long life stage in between adolescence and adulthood that you could just call brunch.

And in millennial brunch culture or in older generations, like barbecue culture, you just kind of hang out. And that is not a bad thing. That's actually really fun if you're extroverted and have way too much time on your hands. No, I'm kidding. That's great. But it's not community in the Christian sense of the word.

John Eldridge, the Christian therapist, writes about three layers of conversation. The first is the shallows, which is basically chit-chat. Hey, what did you do this week? What are you about? Did you see that new show? The midlands, how are you doing emotionally? How are you feeling? What was your week? like in that way, and the depths. This is where you get even below your feelings to what's driving the core of your being.

The culture of Southern California is, I can say this now, is insider critique. It is painfully superficial. I mean, you earn some stereotypes straight up. We all hate stereotypes, but we have to be honest. They are fairly accurate a lot of the time. It is incredibly superficial. And so in particular in a place like L.A., you can be at the table and yet still feel totally alone.

How does the table become more than just another brunch party or dinner with friends who just happen to go to the same church together? How does it become, in the language of Paul's letter to the Corinthians, a communion? with God himself and with the family, our brothers and sisters with the Father.

Well, there's no silver bullet for life and certainly not for discipleship. But one of my favorite hacks, or at least shortcuts, is to just go around the table every single week if we can. and share highs and lows from the last seven days, which is our exercise for the week ahead. And behind this exercise is a much larger theological framework. from the life of Jesus himself, where we regularly see Jesus.

sharing his joys and sharing his sorrows with his community. Let me just show you this one example from Mark 14. Look again at verse 22. I just want to work through this passage, and I want to show you two stories that... are back-to-back in Mark's biography that showcase this both-and framework in Jesus' life. The first story takes place on the last night right before Jesus' death on the cross. In context, Jesus and his apprentices...

are around the table for the Passover meal, which is an annual Jewish feast. The closest we have to this would be, say, Thanksgiving. But it pales in comparison to the kind of weighty meaning behind the Passover, which was sociopolitical. It was an ethnic kind of origin story. It was a full week-long celebration. Pretty much everybody would be on vacation in our language. This was the meal of meals, the apex of the Jewish calendar.

And Jesus used this annual feast and this particular meal to introduce a new meal. practice, which, based on the story, we now call the Lord's Supper. Look again at verse 22, and let's just read a few of Jesus' final words. While they were eating, so they're sitting around the Passover table, right? This is, imagine in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner or something.

Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and he gave it to his disciples, saying, take it, this is my body. So he begins to import a new meaning into a... meal that's already rich with symbolic ritual. Then he took a cup. When he had given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank from it. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, he said to them.

Truly, as I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. So this is a signpost to the future kingdom. When, 26, they had sung a hymn, they then went out to the Mount of Olives. Now, there's a lot going here, and we're just going to scratch the surface. But here's one headline. Jesus is feasting with his community.

on the night before his betrayal, arrest, torture, and death. He's eating a celebratory meal with a small circle, not the thousands, not even the hundreds, just... 12, 15, 20 of his closest family, friends, and community. And he continues his followers to continue on this simple practice. In Luke's version of the story, we read, this is my body, this is from Jesus' own mouth, given for you. What poignant language.

Do this, referring to the meal, in remembrance of me. The verb do there is poiete in Greek, and it's in the present active imperative tense. You don't need to remember that. That just means it's a command to keep doing this, not just a one-off, do this this one time. No, I want you to do this. This needs to be woven into the fabric of your daily life.

And this is the practice that Jesus left his disciples to organize our entire life together around. It's come to be called the Lord's Supper, or Communion, or the Eucharist. But what we often miss... in the modern church is that originally, not only, and I said this a few weeks ago, not only was the Lord's Supper originally, for the first at least two centuries, a full meal around a table, but it was also done in a...

of joy. Often we think of the Lord's Supper as this very sacred and very somber kind of moment, right? So even we call it the Eucharist, depending on what tradition you're from, which is interesting. That's a Greek phrase that goes all the way back to the first Christians. In English, it just means the Thanksgiving. Why do we use the Greek phrase and not just say the Thanksgiving? I think in part because if you say it in Greek, it sounds more holy.

And it is really holy. My point here is not to degrade it. But it's a particular type of holiness that is infused with joy. The early Christians called this weekly meal in the memory of Jesus the agape feast or the love party. Like the Passover, it was a celebration, but instead of being done... annually. It was done every single week, most historians think, on Sunday evenings at the end of the Lord's Day, meaning Jesus designed our life together in community to be built. around joy.

Now let me double click on this and go a little bit deeper with you because there's a really important kind of theological weight to this. And if you miss it, we'll just kind of think, yeah, I want to be happy. Jesus wants to be happy. Let's have dinner together. And we'll miss what's underneath it all. In the story the scriptures tell, God himself, and man, I wish I had another hour to talk about this one claim, but God himself is the most joyful being in all of the universe.

From page one, he's just singing out, it is good, it is good, it is good. Here, here, look at this, look at that. It is good. This is the portrait of God. The writer of Hebrews said of Jesus, the incarnation, that Jesus was anointed, and this was based on a prophecy from Isaiah, quote, with the oil of joy. You could put that into kind of evangelical language and say Jesus' spiritual gift was being happy all the time.

He was anointed. God put a spirit of joy on Jesus. Jesus himself said his will for his followers was, quote, that my joy may be in you, that your joy may be, my version of the Bible reads, complete other versions read overflow think of that feeling when you have so much joy well up from inside you that you have to like I don't know yell or dance or laugh or clap it's like you have to like spontaneously just

offload it to the atmosphere around you. That at some level is Jesus' will for you. How many of you ever wonder, like, what is God's will for my life? I'm that type of personality. I have an existential crisis about every 39 minutes. So I think that often, right? Like, what is God's will? What is God's direction over my life? And that's a meta question and a really good one to ask. mask.

But you know what I know is God's will for my life and for yours from the mouth of Jesus himself is that his joy would be in me and in you and that it would overflow into the atmosphere.

around. In Paul's list of the fruit of the Spirit, what comes right after love, the most important one? Joy, even before peace or patience or kindness and down the list. Did you know that your brain literally has, and this is kind of neuroscientist slang, but a joy center in the right orbital prefrontal cortex. One of the leading neuroscientists in the world was at the last gathering. And I asked him, I said, is this true? And he said, most.

Mostly. So I'm going to take that. I'm going to take this. Mostly is pretty good for a preacher, right? I'm talking about neuroscience. It's not with the Bible. You need to get better than mostly. But you know what I'm saying. I'm no neuroscientist, so I cannot really confirm or deny, but I have read this. It is the only part of the brain that never loses its capacity to grow.

Which is why many elderly people you know are some of, and there's the opposite of this too, which is another sermon, but some of the happiest people you know. They're just delighted with the simplest pleasure of seeing a grandkid once a year or just having a nice dessert or a good cup of coffee. They're just... full of genuine joy, they have spent decades or half a century or twice that building the joy center in their brain.

The problem is, while our brains are, at one level, made to run on joy, they are damaged by the trauma of sin, which means they are bent toward the negative. If you're driving down the street and on your right hand... is a flower stand, and there are people buying and selling flowers just to love each other with joy. And on your left-hand side are two people like yelling at each other, screaming on the side of the road in some kind of an altercation, like gesticulating at each other.

other, what's your brain going to pay attention to? you're not even going to notice that there is a flower stand. You will not even enter your conscience awareness because your brain is wired to focus on the negative or the positive. Neuroscientists tell us at a ratio of about 14 to 1. One scientist I read said it's like our brains are flypaper for negativity and Teflon for positivity.

Research says our thoughts are 80% negative and 95% repetitive. We just loop on the same anxieties and fear and hurts and resentments and bitterness and anger. psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, formerly at Chapman University here, called this psychic entropy. in his work on flow, which is his language for the tendency of your brain and mind to basically just, when it doesn't have something really good to absorb itself in, to just kind of devolve down into chaos and negative rumination.

Joy is not our default state. And this matters because, to borrow a famous line from the mouth of Nehemiah, the joy of the Lord is our strength. which is more than just a sentimental kind of idea. It's actually a key psycho-spiritual insight. The joy of Jesus is what fills our inner being with the strength, with the kind of emotional capacity. capacity and buoyancy to basically rise above the troubled waters of life and live the way of Jesus. Joy is like the oxygen that our soul needs.

in order to do hard things. That's why Rick Ho and his wonderful work on joy called the pursuit of joy a moral obligation. Do you think about joy that way or happiness that way? And sometimes you'll hear Christian preachers distinguish between joy and happiness. There's just a small problem with that called the Bible, which does not do that at all. Joy is happiness. Happiness is joy.

Do you think of it as a moral obligation for you and I to become a happy or joy-filled soul before God? Why? Because without joy, one reason. We are incredibly vulnerable to temptation and to sin and to the machinations of evil. Low joy people are prone to sin. One of Satan's primary strategies is deceiving us into believing that sin will make us happy.

So think about it. Like every decision you've made that you regret, every sin in your life right now or compulsive or addictive behavior that you wish you could stop but you just can't. Like, none of it is done by you or I out of duty. We're not just like, well, I'm not really in the mood, but it's 7.30 p.m. on a Thursday night. I read Atomic Habits by Tom Clear, and I just, James Clear, and I just, man, I need a habit stack my way into addiction to sin. Like, no.

That's how we approach the gym. That's how we approach a lot of our work life. It's even how we approach some difficult relationships. But none of us approach sin that way. Why? We sin. Because we believe a lie about what will make us happy. Because we confuse pleasure with happiness and we trade short-term gratification for long-term soul deep satisfaction in God. Secondly, low joy relationships.

are prone to fracture. It's just easier when we're tired and irritable and hangry and exhausted and unhappy or depressed to wound each other or be wounded by each other. And for our relationships to fall apart. Because of that, low joy communities are prone to fall apart. They rarely last. One thing I love about this church is just the joy that's woven into everything.

Joy binds us to each other and to God. My dad, who's got to be an Enneagram 7, used to say to our family, the family that plays together stays together. And he was right. There's like good data behind that. if we play together, if we put joy at the center of our relationships and our communities, we are better equipped to handle the inevitable storms of life. by cultivating joyful attachment where we bond to each other and to God through a shared experience of gratitude and joy.

We form and create with God. We co-create a resilience that we need to stay faithful to God in a city like L.A. But there is a discipline to this. especially for some of us. If you're a bit more like my personality, Lord have mercy on you if so. The Catholic spiritual writer Henry Nouwen said it this way, joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every single day. Our relationship to joy is not...

It's not, Richard Foster used to say, it's not something that just falls on your head. Oh, wow, joy, like it's raining today. No, it's... active. You and I have a part to play in the measure of joy in our body. The Quaker professor Richard Foster called this the discipline of celebration. Many people think of the spiritual disciplines as somber and serious and for introverted intellectual types. This may come as a pleasant surprise to you that celebration is a discipline.

That is really important, and if you practice it with intentionality and regularity, it can make you a more joy-filled person, and in doing so, a more Christ-like. person because he was anointed with the oil of joy. It permeates his interactions with all.

In our culture of authenticity, though, it can feel, and some of you, a subset of you in the room will know exactly what I'm talking about, it can feel wrong, like almost... morally wrong, like a violation of our authenticity to choose joy when we don't feel happy.

there's like this like rousseauian kind of romanticism that's in all of us at some level that's like i'm in a horrible mood and i just need to be true to myself i'm like yeah but you know you just make sure you're where yourself is like a pathological narcissist who's stuck in the prison of your own mind, full of self-defeating behavior, wounding the people all around you. So, you know, be careful with that methodology because it's a little suspect, you know?

So yes, there is a moment to deeply touch, honestly, our pain. We'll talk about that in just a minute. This is a both and. It's also a moment to actually... Work against your feelings. Work against your natural inclinations to choose joy. To do otherwise is to misunderstand how our brains are wired by God and, again, damaged by the trauma of... sin. We can't flip a switch, I can't at least, and just be happy. Some of you have that like level of detachment in your personality, and I'm so jealous.

I know that if you were sitting with a therapist, they would tell you that's a coping mechanism. It's called denial, and it's wounding all the people around you. But as far as coping mechanisms go, it's about as good as they get, guys. It's a lot better than drugs and alcohol and all these.

other things. It's a lot better than my personal coping mechanism. So, you know, all right, if you have to pick one, that's not a bad one. But I don't have that kind of a brain. I cannot just flip a switch and stop being sad and start being happy. But you know what I can do? You know what is within the realm of the range of my effective willpower as a disciple of Jesus? And I still need grace for it. But you know what I can do? Every Saturday night, I can put my phone in a box.

I can make dinner. I can put on some good tunes. I can sit down as the sun is setting with my family and some of my closest friends. I can pray. We can do gratitude rituals. We can do highlight of the week. We can do an affirmation circle. We can eat a meal together. We can open a bottle of wine. We can have dessert and we can have seconds on dessert with no shame. One night a week.

I can do all of that. And I can do it not just to, quote, be happy, but to devote my life to God at a deeper level as a spiritual discipline, as an offering. to the living God when I'm in the mood to do it and when I am not in the mood to do it. And what God can do through just the simple offering of time, space, and a willing heart.

And that's really, there's a lot of mystery between what's our part, what's God's part. Theologians have been arguing about that for thousands of years, and I doubt they'll figure it out anytime soon. But whatever our part is, I think we have a part. I think, too, it's really important. I think, really, it's mostly just about giving time, space, and consent. Just God hears. It's all the disciplines are. Time, space, consent. Here I am. Take me.

Do for me what I cannot do for myself. That is grace. We have to form micro-communities of defiant joy. that resists the gaping black hole that is the outrage and toxicity of our current cultural moment. The fear, the anger, the other on both sides of the raging debate. Communities that constantly...

throw celebrations. It should be said of us, wait, you're throwing another celebration, another birthday party, another gratitude thing like you just did that. Little outposts of celebration and gratitude and laughter. and happiness in the middle of the war zone the late modern west only then will we have the strength and that is the right word to stay together and stay faithful

to obedience to Jesus in a city like LA in a year like this one. We do this by sharing our joys, but secondly, by sharing our sorrows. Story number two, look back at the text.

Right after this first ever Lord's Supper, Jesus and his disciples migrate from the upper room to Gethsemane. They end the meal in verse 26 by singing a hymn. This is a fun fact. The one time you see Jesus sing in the four gospels. And when does it happen? Hours before his arrest, betrayal, torture, and crucifixion.

discipline of celebration. He knows what's coming, and he is choosing to sing, choosing what Bono called defiant joy in the face of the cross. Then he goes to the Mount of Olives, which is this kind of hillside park. Just a short walk. He would have been in the urban center of Jerusalem. This is a short walk up the hill to this, basically a park. Think like a central park or something like that on the side of Jerusalem. It's still there. Verse 32. They went to a place called Gethsemane.

And Jesus said to his disciples, okay, you sit here while I pray. Which at first you think, all right, he's going to put them here and he's going to go, you know, practice what we would call silence and solitude. Go be by himself with God. But then, 33, he took peace. Peter, James, and John, along with him.

Interesting. So there's this subset of the 12 that Jesus was closer to that you read about a lot. He took the three, Peter, James, and John. And then he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. That verb began implies... intention. Like he goes, time, space, consent, right? He goes into the quiet, gets out of the noise of the city. Interesting. He's not all alone. He has his three closest friends right there.

And he intentionally begins, in modern therapeutic language, to feel his feelings. To let what is in his gut come up. What's in his body, let it come up to the surface of his mind. And to actually feel. feel the horror that is just below his conscious awareness. He began to be deeply distressed. This is not stoicism. This is not happy-clappy. This is not Christian cliche. He began to be deeply distressed.

distressed, and troubled. This is the man who said, let not your heart be what? Troubled. Here he is, troubled. 34, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow, grief, pain, lament, to the point of death, he said to them. Stay here and keep watch. Verse 34 can also be translated, my soul is crushed. with grief to the point of death. My anguish is so great that I feel, here's another one, as if I'm dying. Like that's the level. Have you ever felt like that?

You would almost rather die than feel the emotional pain that you're in touch with. He's doing this on purpose. 35, going a little farther, he fell to the ground. Notice it doesn't say he got down on his knees. He fell over. Have you ever literally just...

fallen in grief and prayed that if possible, this hour, what's about to come, might pass from him. God, is there another way? Abba. If you've been to Palestine, you hear little kids running up to their dads to this day and saying, Abba. It's a term of... Dear my father, he said, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me, referring to the cross. Yet, not what I will, but you will. Consent. Willing.

surrender here. And the story goes on. I just want you to see, again, so many layers here. I just want you to see, here is Jesus feeling the lead weight of hell itself, drag his soul down. And what does he do? First, discipline of celebration, feast, Passover. Then... Go to the quiet. Not get alone. Invite his three closest friends. Not even the 12.

not even his kind of kinship group with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. If you remember those four layers of community from a few weeks ago, there's lots of research about and all of which kind of map over the life of Jesus. This is just him and that inner circle, not even his kinship group or his community, just his three closest friends. He asked them to just be with him.

through the most trying moment of his life. They can't fix it. They can't stop the freight train that is coming. But you know what they can do? They can just sit there. And just be with him. Quietly pray next to him. Now remember, if you're in the room and you are an apprentice of Jesus or a disciple under Jesus,

you are learning how to live your life in LA in 2025 or wherever you call home as if Jesus would live it if he were in your time and place and in your shoes. So when we read a story, it's... always primarily about Jesus and the Gospels, but it's also about us and about our relationship to Jesus. So we're constantly thinking, all right, what do I have to learn? What does this story have to teach me? In this story, we learn from Jesus that we are to share.

not just the highs, but also the lows of our life together. If Jesus, what early Christians called the God-man, fully God and fully human if Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, if he needed a few of his closest friends to bear the weight of the cross. How much more so do you or I need a few close friends just to carry the weight of our own crosses and of our own life?

We are not built to carry the weight of life alone or our sin-damaged brains alone. One of the first lines about humans in the Bible is, it is not good. For the man to be alone. If you know Genesis, to put it into like 90s vibes, this is like a record scratch moment, right? So you just hear this refrain, it is good, it is good, it is good. And then you get to Adam and it's like...

It is not good for the man to be alone. And this is said in the story before sin entered the picture. were made not just to be together, but also in the language of Paul's letter to the Galatians, to carry each other's burdens. That's a command in the New Testament. You. carry your brother and sister's burdens. Go stand next to them, like Peter, James, and John with Jesus, and they were terrible friends, but you get the idea. Stand next to Jesus, and stand next to your...

friends, your community in the moment. We can't escape pain. Jesus was incredibly honest, much more so than many of us are. In this world, you will have trouble. Following Jesus does not make you immune to trouble. If anything, it will attract more of it. but it is exponentially more bearable when it's shared. And if we follow Jesus by the template that he himself laid down for us, then it does mean that we should no longer have to carry that trouble alone.

Last week, your teaching text was one of the most famous lines in the New Testament about church and why church is really important. From Hebrews 10, let us consider, just to repeat it, how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching.

People often point out the author's command to not give up meeting together. Pastors like myself love to quote this over their church to remind them of how important it is to come to church on Sundays. And that is really good to hear. miss is what we are to do when we meet together. Notice the author doesn't say to sing or to listen to a sermon.

or even to read or study scripture, or even to pray. All good things that were all done by the first Christians. Not even to eat the meal together, which is the primary organizing principle. He says to, quote, encourage one another. The reason meeting together regularly is so important is because if your heart is anything like mine, I need encouragement basically constantly.

which I know says a lot about me, and judge me all you want, it's accurate. I need, my brain needs another person's brain to comfort. The psychic entropy of my own. Did you know that the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter by Jesus? You likely have read that line. The Greek word is paraclete. It's a difficult word to translate into English. It means one who comes alongside. So imagine just coming alongside somebody who's weak or weary and you comfort them or you help.

shoulder the load or you carry a burden or you meet a practical need or you just encourage that person, right? The word in Hebrews, that word encourage, is parakaleo in Greek. It is the verb form of the noun paraclete. Meaning... Our role in a community is similar to that of the Holy Spirit. We are to search out people in pain and who are suffering, who are carrying a heavy load, and we are to come alongside our brothers and our sisters to help them shoulder that load.

to comfort, to encourage, to put courage into them, to support and build them up. To strengthen them when they are weak. To direct them when they are lost. To love them when they are ashamed. Just like God. And that is often how. the Holy Spirit is coming alongside. In fact, the New Testament, again, commands us to encourage one another.

personal table community. We meet every Sunday night. We kind of end the Sabbath all together with a big Lord's Supper meal on Sunday nights. Look forward to it all week long. We're all especially looking forward to it this weekend because it's kind of a long story, but there's a mutual friend of

myself and another member in the community who's this, like, Texas business guy. And he says, thank you for this thing. It doesn't matter. You don't need the details. The punchline is, this week he sent us two giant slabs of Tesco. Texas brisket barbecue. I didn't even know you could take a dead cow and mail it. I had no idea.

I'm Mr. Plant-based or whatever. That's out the window tonight. We do potluck every week, so we just send out a theme. Normally, it's like Mediterranean mesa or soup and salad. Tonight, it's Texas barbecue. So all of us Californians are just getting our best Texas side on for tonight. We have brisket that's going to slow bake in my oven all afternoon long. So tonight, party at our house. You're not invited. Less brisket. Me.

But one thing we do every Sunday night, and we really try to do this every single Sunday night, is just an affirmation circle for one person. Normally, if I'm leading, I will just pick who you can just kind of see. their eyes who had a rough week. And we'll just take three minutes and we'll just go around and just affirm that person. And it is amazing. You will watch.

People's posture, they'll often be like hunched over. And you will just see over a minute or two or three, just like encourage, put in courage, new buoyancy, joy. Come into the frame of a body and a soul. So simple. A third grader could do it. And yet so helpful. We need this. We need to be encouraged. But here's the caveat. Listen, for this to happen, when we are in pain, we have to actually share what's going on underneath the surface. Which is...

really hard, in particular for some personalities. We have to actually say, when people say, hey, how are you? We can't just fake it and get our Christian face on, or our LA face on, or our Christian LA face on. We have to actually say when it's the right time and place with the right person, we have to actually answer that question, which means we have to actually, like Jesus, feel our feelings. touch our pain.

name it, notice it, articulate it to another person with all of the vulnerability that comes with it. Again, you can be around a table with a dozen people you love and care about and still feel profoundly alone. if you do not actually share your heart. And this is, again, what we see in the person of Jesus himself.

Joyful as he was, the prophet Isaiah also said that the Messiah would be, quote, a man of sorrows who was no stranger to suffering. Anointed with the oil of joy, that's what the Messiah will be like.

A man of sorrows, no stranger to suffering. That's what the Messiah will be like. Well, which one? Yes. to quote the Apostle Paul, as sorrowful, but yet always rejoicing. Sorrow and joy intermix in this life, not one or the other, but both and. But look at what Jesus did in his... darkest hour. Again, just called for his friends. Peter, James, John, I can't even be alone in prayer right now. I don't even need you to say anything. I literally just can't. I need you just...

there. I just need your presence. I just need like whatever quantum mechanics will discover someday, whatever the vibe you're giving me. I just need that. I need that strength. One of the first things you learn if you study trauma is that all of us have some form of trauma. It's just a matter of degree. And that's not like...

you know, tick-tocky over-exaggeration. Most trauma experts would all say that. Gabor Mate, for example, and others distinguish between capital T trauma and lowercase t trauma. Capital T trauma is what happens to a few of us. Iraq or Afghanistan, and it's like horrific damage to your brain. Lowercase t, trauma is what happens to all of us. The biblical word for trauma is wounding.

Think of a line like, by his stripes we are healed. That's the biblical metaphor. Wounding, not just to the body, but to the soul. Trauma is where we have been wounded, and all of us have been wounded. Wounded. But experts argue that trauma or wounding is not so much what happens to you. It happens to all of us. None of us enter adulthood unwounded.

Most of us enter in denial, but none of us enter unwounded. But trauma, wounding, is less what happens to you, and it's more, it's counterintuitive, but it's true. how your mind and body processes what happens to you. You could push that a little to put it in more Christian language and say it's the truth or the lies that your body... at some subconscious level, believes based on an experience of pain. Which is why two people can go through the exact same experience. One is shattered by it.

And the other, if you give them enough time, is honestly kind of strengthened by it. And the single most important factor in the difference between those two people is not who's tougher, not who's smarter. Not who's more godly. It's whether or not they have community. One of the landmark studies on trauma was done by the social psychologist James Pennebaker and his team at the University of Texas. And this is all going somewhere, I promise.

They wanted to know why it was that some people went through a traumatic experience and were devastated by it. They just seemed to never really emotionally recover. But others went through a traumatic experience, and they seemed to not only make a full emotional recovery, they seemed to actually really grow. It made them larger, not smaller as a person, a phenomenon that therapists call post-traumatic growth.

They conducted a massive research study trying to figure out, like, why is it that some people have these two different outcomes? Their hypothesis going in, which makes sense, was that traumatic events that bore a social stigma were harder to recover from than those that elicit empathy.

So they specifically looked at victims of sexual assault and also, interesting, at spouses whose partner committed suicide. As you can imagine, some of you don't have to imagine, I have a friend. This was her experience. the social shame that you would feel. the whispers in back rooms about you, where people would avoid you and not want to talk to you about your pain. Certain types of pain, we go to each other. Other types of pain, we're just like, oh, I can't.

bring that up i can't talk to that so that was their theory right that would be the make or break they found after years of research there was virtually they concluded that their hypothesis was totally wrong That there was actually virtually no correlation between the nature of the trauma and whether or not a person made an emotional recovery.

What they found, the strongest data point they found on all of their research, and this has been reconfirmed by multiple studies, over and over again, was that if people went through a traumatic experience and had a close friend or a community... walk with them through it. And if they were honest during that process to process the pain, they usually came out okay, even if it took a long time.

key factor was, is this person alone? Even alone in the prison of their own mind? Or are they in a family-like community? As the psychologist Robert Stolerow once put it, trauma is emotional pain that is yet to find a relational home. We need a relational home. And not just like as in... four walls and a roof, as in like a family, to carry our emotional pain and to do the same for others. The stakes are

Hi, you see where I'm going with all of this? As scary as it is for many of us in the room, and for good reason, based on your body's experience of life, We have to share our highs and our lows with each other. Share what's really going on in order to heal. And not just to heal as in like have the pain go away or down and feel better. Remember, for us, we're followers of Jesus.

The goal is not pain management or happiness. The goal is to become people that are pervaded by the love of Christ himself, to love God with all of our heart. soul, mind, and strength to love our neighbor as ourself. Anything that blocks our receiving of the love of God and its overflow and the giving out into other people, that's what we call sin.

Anything that blocks it is cause for our close attention. Our goal is not just to heal. It's for our wounds to become what now one called sacred wounds. What he meant by that was there's some wounds that not only do they heal, they become God's call in your life. They become your authority spiritually. to love and encourage others. They become wisdom that comes to us, what's the ancient Greek poem say, by the awful grace of God.

They become how God forms our heart and releases to us and reveals to us our destiny. That's the final stage. of healing from our pain, not just when we don't feel so sad anymore, but when actually we can own our pain and we can allow God to use it to heal others in their pain.

You get to the point where you would never have wanted that pain if you could go back and you had to flip the switch like no pain. You would flip that switch if you're a decent person. But to where there's a weird part of us that is grateful. Because God's healing has been so deep and so profound. And we know.

that we would not be able to participate in God's love toward others in this same way if it had not been for that pain. If you are not there in your pain or your healing process, please, no shame. For many of us, that is a multi-decade process. But that is part of the process of following Jesus. It's a lot more than that. But following Jesus is not less than that.

It is about the wound of sin being healed and becoming a sacred wound by which the love of God comes to the world. So, sharing our joys. and sharing our sorrows. Is this what your table conversation is like? Or is it a little bit more LA? Listen. This is the invitation. This is how we become a community of love and depth and a culture of individualism and superficiality.

And the best possible way that I know how to do this is simply to do life together around a table. On that note, our exercise for our spiritual exercise for this week, and it is a spiritual exercise, is just to be done, first off, around a table.

around the table, around a meal, where our invitation to you is to eat a meal with your community wherever you're at on the growth pathway over the next month. As we said before, this week our exercise is simple. It's just go around the table and share your highs and lows.

lows from the week. Share your highs, something you're grateful for, an evidence of grace in your life where you're just full of joy. Celebrate with each other regardless of where you're at and share honestly about your lows as much as you feel ready, willing and able to. And our reach exercise is very simple. It's to get together with a trusted friend and just share about a deeper struggle as honestly as you can.

whether that is a wound or a pain or a wound that is yet to become a sacred wound or whatever it may be. Or if you want to flip that around, you're like, I'm actually doing pretty good. Then get together with a friend that you know that is going through a hard season and just encourage. them. Let me buy you coffee. I'm taking you on a hike. We're going surfing Friday morning. Meet me here at 6 30 a.m. And just go and just put courage into their heart. And Jesus left us.

The table. It's so fascinating to me as a pastor. One thing that I'm just bewildered by is how little Jesus said about how we should organize church life together. You would think. It would have been helpful to me, certainly.

But Jesus did not leave us an architectural blueprint for a church building to worship in. Churches didn't even have buildings like this for hundreds of years. He did not leave us a liturgy to follow, hence why there's just this wide array of worship styles across the globe. Global Historic Church. He left us the table.

Professor Joseph Hellerman, again in my favorite book on community, writes about how just unlikely it was that the early church even survived the Roman Empire, much less eventually toppled it. Said Christians had no temples. no sacrifices, no priesthoods, no liturgy. Today's language, no Bible colleges, no seminaries, no websites, no social media accounts, no celebrity preachers, just an informal weekly meeting in a local home.

where they broke bread and they sang a hymn. This is hardly the stuff of a major world religion. Yet Christians gathering, often in secret because of persecution, usually on a Sunday night, in Chloe's... open air courtyard, some patron just getting together, sharing a meal. master and slave, men and women, Jews and Gentiles and Romans and Greeks and Syrians and just there. This is my body. This is my blood.

That changed the course of history. You are here in this room because of that. Just a meal with Jesus. I told you two weeks ago that I was going to massively overcomplicate this practice to give myself job security. But this is really simple stuff. Are you picking up how simple this is? share a regular meal with a smaller subset of this group, just a little group that can be like a functional family of brothers and sisters.

put Jesus at the center of it, not debriefing the latest critically acclaimed show or your work, like Jesus and discipleship to Jesus at the center. And three, share honestly. You have to be honest for this to work. about the highs and the lows of life. If you do those three simple things, you will be 90% of the way there toward following Jesus in community.

So this coming week, may you share more than just dinner, more than just bread, more than just wine. And may you open your hearts to each other. Share your joys and your sorrows and share in the joy and the sorrow and the love and the peace and the patience and the kindness. that is at the heart of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Let's stand together and pray.

The concept of trauma being emotional pain that has yet to find a relational home is quite significant. Our deepest hurts and fears don't have to stay locked inside us, but can actually find healing. when we bring them into trusted relationships. When surface-level conversations are the norm or a primary way of interacting, many of us, as a result, carry pain that was never meant to be carried alone. So to end.

Let's take some time to talk with the Holy Spirit about the pain in your life that you're carrying and where that might find a relational home. Start by taking a few deep breaths with me. Become aware of God's presence. And when you're ready, start by asking the Holy Spirit, what hurt or fear am I trying to carry alone?

If nothing comes to mind, that's totally okay. We don't want to assume there's lingering pain where there isn't. But we would encourage you to take some extended time to sit before God with that question. and see if anything comes to the surface of your heart. But if you did have something come up, let's take a minute to ask God about it. Holy Spirit, who should I share this with? I'll leave a few more seconds here and then close with Amen.

Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. If you enjoy the show, consider leaving a rating or review. It'll help others find us. We're a crowdfunded non-profit so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Trend from Madeira, California.

Simone from Arcadia, Oklahoma. Allison from Lynchburg, Virginia. Megan from South Jordan, Utah. And Brianna from Henderson, Nevada. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may you go in peace to love and serve the Lord.