[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Well, once again, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead ministers here and we are starting a new teaching series this week on our core values as a church. Some of you have been a part of this process for about the past year. We went through a process here at the Oceanside Sanctuary called Appreciative Inquiry where we essentially engage with the members of the congregation and also members of the community in order to discern what our future might look like as a church. This is something we do as a rule of thumb about every five years because we think things in the world change quickly and we need to be able to adapt and adjust to how our mission is calling us to meet needs in this community as the community around us changes. This church is 150 years old and one of the reasons we've been around that long is because at different, different times in our history, we've been flexible enough to try to understand what the needs around us might be. And that process surfaced a number of different things as we were creating our mission for the next five years, which sometimes we refer to as Mission 2030. So if you ever hear me talking about Mission 2030, that was the result of this year long process. We are essentially figuring out what we want to look like by the time 2030 rolls around. Well, one of the things that surfaced that process was a kind of refining of our core values as a church. In other words, what are the things that we hold most dear that are most important to us? And these are expressions that you helped to create if you were a part of that process. And those five core values are this number one, authentic belonging. If there was like a chart of the things that came out that were just like amazingly abundantly clear, this first one was it. It was like, you know, the most obvious result of our appreciative inquiry, and that is that you all believe that our church is a place where you can authentically belong, that you are not just welcome, that you're not just included, that you have a seat at the table, but that it's your table, that this is your church, your congregation, this is your building, and there's some things that need fixing.
That's Sort of a joke. So this is your community.
You belong here not because you are successfully pretending to be a Christian. You belong here because we have said, whoever you are, however you are, we welcome you in that way. And that's a big part of who we are. We're going to talk a little bit more about that today.
In addition, we said four other things were our core values, integrated spirituality.
I don't know what that means. We'll find out.
I do know what it means. I'm kidding.
Well, she's not wrong.
Number three, sacred stories. We really highly value the way that our spirituality is grounded in stories. We're going to talk about that in a couple of weeks.
Number four, liberating love. We believe the whole point of Christianity is love, and the whole point of that love is to liberate us from bondage and oppression of various kinds. And then lastly, faith in action. We believe that the things that we believe ought to have consequences for the way that we live our lives. And those consequences have a very particular flavor for justice. We're going to get into all five of those, but today we are specifically going to look at authentic belonging and why we believe that's such an important core value here. We're going to do that through a passage From Luke, chapter 9, verses 1 through 10, among others. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. Excuse me. Luke, chapter 19, verses 1 through 10. If you have a Bible, you're welcome to turn there. Otherwise, as always, always, we will put the passage right up on there on the screen. And it says this.
He, being Jesus, entered Jericho and was passing through it. And a man was there named Zacchaeus.
He was a chief tax collector and was rich.
He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not because he was short in stature.
I feel that.
So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and he said, zacchaeus, hurry come down, for I must stay at your house today.
So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.
And all who saw it began to grumble and said, he's gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.
Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.
And then Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house because he too, is The Son of Abraham, but the Son of Man came out to seek out and to save the lost.
Would you just say a prayer with me?
God, we thank youk again for today. We thank youk for this place and for the people who call this church home and have made it their community. We pray that as we bring our fears this morning, as we bring our anxiety, our frustration, our anger, our hope, as we bring our high ideals for what it might look like to live out your good news.
We pray that you would meet us in all of those places, that you'd meet us in all of those emotions, all of those hopes and dreams, and that you would guide us through a spirituality that strengthens us to be the kind of people that we hope for.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
Our first value, like I said, is authentic belonging. And I imagine should be fairly obvious why I chose that passage.
Our core value is articulated in this way. If you'll just give. Give this a listen. Authentic belonging means this because Jesus welcomed those who were marginalized, unseen, or excluded.
We create a safe and affirming community where everyone can bring their whole selves and know they belong.
That's how we articulate this.
Because Jesus did this, we do as well. There's a direct flow from what we see Jesus doing. We see it, we like it, we think it's a good idea, right?
I have high blood pressure, by the way. This is a relatively new thing. It runs in my family.
Sometime last year, I got really sick. And while I was sick, I was like, please don't make me go to the doctor.
Janelle said, fortunately, we have a friend who's a doctor. She made Tina come to the house.
Didn't make her. Tina was happy to come to the house and bring her a little black bag, right? I'm a terrible patient, right? And I complained and grumbled and she took my temperature and she stuck something in my mouth or something like that. And then she put a cuff on my arm and she took my blood pressure and she said, holy cow, that is not what you want to hear a doctor say when they take your blood pressure.
And it was somewhere like on the order of like 165 over 120 or something like that. I'm sure that means something to some of you. It doesn't really mean anything to me, but that triggered an appointment at another doctor, and then that triggered, you know, like a prescription. Now, if I didn't believe that I had high blood pressure, then I wouldn't be taking that stupid little pill. Every single morning, that lowers my blood pressure.
The reason that we practice authentic belonging here is because we believe that when Jesus saw Zacchaeus up in the tree and he said, I see you up there. Come down. I need to spend time with you at your house, we believe that that is a good thing.
We believe that a good way to be in the world, a good way to live in the world, is to be the kinds of people who see people like Zacchaeus, people who are hated, people who are reviled, people who are judged because of their job, because of their social status, because of their standing in some way, and because Jesus welcomed people like that.
We read a story like this and we say, yeah, that seems good to me.
It seems good to me that the way to be in this world is to not reject people or exclude people or vilify people because of something about them.
And so it's like a prescription.
I know that. I believe the doctor and what the doctor said about my blood pressure, because every single morning, I take my prescription.
Now, there's something else about this that's kind of handy.
I take the prescription, and the proof is sort of in the pudding, right? Like, now I take my blood pressure, and it's lower.
It's more like, you know, 115 over 81 or something like that.
And also, by the way, I feel better.
Like, when I think back to the time before I took that medication, I realized, like, sometimes I would lay in my bed in the middle of the night, and I could, like, feel my heart pounding in my ears.
And because I'm, like, dull, I never thought maybe there was a problem, but now I realize, like, I actually feel better. There's a kind of feedback loop, right? Like, I believe the person who said, I have a problem. I took the prescription. I feel better. There's evidence that it actually works. Listen, faith works that way, too.
In fact, that is faith.
Faith is when you read a story about Jesus eating with a tax collector, eating with somebody who was hated in the community, you read it and you say, that sounds right to me. That sounds good to me. And so you go and you begin to examine those parts of your lives where you might be judging other people harshly because of what they do for a living, or judging other people harshly because of the politics that they espouse, or judging other people harshly because of the color of their skin or because the size or the shape of their body or because of the people that they are in a sexual relationship with or because of their gender or because of their citizenship status. It goes on and on and on. You begin to interrogate the reality that you're not like Jesus, that when you see people that you judge, you have a tendency to distance yourself from them.
And because you believe that this might be a good way to live, you start to try to live differently. You bridge the gap with people who are different from you.
Listen, there. There's a person in this church. I won't call them out because it wouldn't be appropriate and they would be embarrassed.
But this person used to go, for many, many years, the kind of church that thought that if you were gay or lesbian or bisexual, that you were somehow inherently sinning, that somehow you were a worse human being.
And they no longer believe that. And so they ended up in a crazy, wacky church like this, where we think that if you love somebody, that. That's the point.
But they realized that they still, this person who's straight and cisgendered, middle class and Caucasian, realized that they're still carrying some, like, misunderstanding about people who are lgbtq.
And so they said to themselves, I want to love people who are different than me, but I don't know very many people who are different than me.
And so this person has gone out of their way to, on a regular basis, invite somebody who is LGBTQ out for lunch or invite them to their house for dinner, because there's something, and maybe you've noticed this, there's something about eating together that breaks down barriers of misunderstanding like almost nothing else.
Like, you can watch a documentary about a group of people, you can think differently about them, you can watch YouTube videos about them, but nothing replaces human contact.
And I'm so impressed by that. I'm so impressed that this person just regularly has made it work a pattern in their life to eat with people who are different than them.
Because I do everything I can to distance myself from people who are different than me.
But she believed the prescription, and so she's living differently.
We see the power of that in this story about Jesus as well.
Jesus, by the way, in this story where he eats with a hated, reviled tax collector, somebody who's considered a sinner, a traitor, somebody who has betrayed his own people. Jesus is doing more than having a meal here. He's doing more than making a statement about this person's status. Jesus is doing theology for us in a really profound way, because eating with somebody is not just a way of getting to know them. It also, especially in Jesus day, was a political act.
Jesus chose to eat with somebody who, as a tax collector, was complicit with Rome, which was an occupying power which subjugated Jesus's community.
And in eating with somebody who was a tax collector, who was seen as a betrayer of the Jewish people, Jesus is making a powerful statement about who belongs in the kingdom of God.
And Jesus answer to that is clear.
Anybody who wants to belong does.
It doesn't matter what they do for a living. It doesn't matter where they come from. It doesn't matter what their socioeconomic status is.
If somebody wants to belong, that is the first requisite step.
And this is, by the way, Jesus main critique against those with whom he's constantly arguing. His main critique is that we have taken the rules and laws and norms of our society and we have weaponized them against each other.
And we tend to do this when we are afraid.
We tend to do this when we're afraid, when we feel like we aren't going to be able to make ends meet. When we feel like we aren't safe in our community, we have a tendency to tribalize.
We look for the signs that you are a part of my people and therefore you're safe with me. And anybody who doesn't meet those signs is separated out in the ancient world, in Jesus time. When we hear them talking about laws, this is what they're talking about.
Maybe the best example of this is From Mark, chapter 2. When Jesus is walking with his disciples on a Saturday. It's a Sabbath, and they're walking through fields of grain. And as they're walking through those fields, they're reaching out and they're picking heads of grain off of the stalks, and they're taking those heads of grain and they're rubbing them between their hands to remove the husks from the wheat. And then they're eating them. This is very much like gleaning from the fields, which was a legal right for poor people in Israel. A portion of the field was given for those who were poor who couldn't meet their own needs. They could go and they could glean from the field so that they could eat. Jesus and his disciples are doing this because they were poor, but they were doing it on the Sabbath.
And so when his opponents saw him and his disciples eating, gleaning from the fields on the Sabbath, doing work, harvesting, separating the wheat right from its and eating, that was like food preparation. And this is breaking the Sabbath law.
And so they condemned him.
Jesus answer to them is interesting. He says, haven't you heard the story of David, who, when he and his men were hungry, break into the temple and they take the showbread, that's the bread that was consecrated for worship in the temple, and they eat that.
He says, I'm doing the same thing.
Jesus doesn't claim that he isn't breaking their norms and rules and laws. He is.
He's saying he's justified in breaking their norms, their rules and their laws because he and his men are poor and hungry.
The principle here is fairly straightforward.
Human needs supersede our laws and our rules because our laws and our rules are meant to serve human needs.
Jesus answer, in fact is this.
Man was not made for the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was made for man.
See, the whole purpose of the Sabbath is so that we would get a day off, we would get some rest, right? Because when we're afraid of making ends meet, when we're afraid of starving to death, when we're afraid of not being able to provide for our families, we work relentlessly, tirelessly, endlessly. And that of course, will kill us.
So we have to remember to rest. And so the Sabbath was given. The whole purpose of the Sabbath is to promote human well being, human flourishing.
But when we take that rule, the rule of not working on the Sabbath, and we weaponize it against people who are simply trying to feed themselves, we've defeated the purpose of the rule.
You've heard this story before, but I'm going to tell it again. Many, many years ago, Janelle and I were good friends with another pastor. This was in Utah, when we lived in Utah.
And he's a Presbyterian pastor, really good friend of ours. We had regular dinner with him and at those dinners he and I would get into endless theological debates because he was a Presbyterian and I was a Pentecostal. And we had differences of opinion about everything. And there were fun, good natured debates. Well, one day our debate centered on something that had actually become quite personal and quite real in his life because he and his wife, who lived on a fairly nice street, lived in a parsonage, that's a fancy word for a house the church pays for, for the pastor, right? Because that's what Presbyterians do.
So that's a joke for those of you.
Because we don't do that here.
They lived in a parsonage and the parsonage, I kid you not, the house that the church paid for for the pastor had an indoor swimming pool.
I'm not begrudging him his indoor swimming pool.
It's just material to the story.
The indoor swimming pool had an outdoor entrance, a door where you could access the pool from the outside. You didn't have to just go through the house to get to the pool. And the. And this house and this family was like, you know, they hosted kids from the neighborhood all the time.
And the kids got to the place where they would just come and use the pool even when the family wasn't home.
And the family who lived there said, hey, we're not comfortable with that. It's not safe. Please don't come and use the pool while we're not here, because kids in the pool need to be supervised.
Perfectly reasonable rule.
Well, the lock on that door broke at some point, and. And the kids were able to go use the pool when the family was gone anytime they wanted to because the lock was broken, door was open.
So the neighbors came to the family and said, hey, by the way, the lock on your door is broken, and we don't want our kids coming over when you're not home. Can you please fix the lock?
And he said, yeah, I mean, I'll fix the lock, but just tell your kids to be obedient.
And that turned into a bit of a power struggle.
And so he sort of stood on principle. I shouldn't have to fix the lock. You should just have obedient children.
Did he not have kids? He did.
Not the most obedient kids either, but it was a wonderful family.
And so then, of course, the neighborhood got to talking about this family and gossiping about this family and grumbling about this family. And that really infuriated him when he discovered that people were talking about them behind their back.
And so he was complaining about this to me one night over dinner. We were having, you know, another one of those dinners, another one of those debates. And he was complaining to me about the way that his character was being maligned behind his back by all these people in the neighborhood. And I said, phil, just fix the lock.
It's the right thing to do.
You wouldn't want some kid drowning in your pool.
I kid you not. This wonderful, loving human being said to me, what these people are doing is a violation of Matthew 18, which is a passage that says you shouldn't speak about each other behind their back, right?
He said, I'm more upset about the violation of Matthew 18 than I am about the lock.
And he said, I would rather a child drowned in my pool than see Matthew 18 be violated.
And I said, phil, man was not made for Matthew 18.
Matthew 18 was made for man.
It's the one good theological comeback I've ever had in my life.
The point is, we have rules and laws to serve our needs, to make life good, to protect us from harm, and to promote human flourishing. That's why we have rules and laws.
But at some point, those rules and laws are easily twisted, co opted and weaponized against people because of their differences.
And when that happens, we violate the law by insisting on keeping it.
I think this is really beautifully illustrated by this quote. This is our next book club book, by the way. It's Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang.
If you want to buy a copy of it, you'll see we have a little bookshelf out here in the cafe. There are a few copies. They're like 24 bucks. You can make a donation to the church for $24 or $2,400 or whatever you feel like making.
But the author, John Fugelsang, in this particular chapter, he's asking a Jewish rabbi.
Daniel Rutenberg, fantastic Jewish rabbi, has a strong social media presence. He's asking her about the laws and the rules against LGBTQ people in ancient society.
And he says, I asked Rabbi Daniel Rudenberg about Christians who pick and choose parts of the ancient Jewish law so they don't otherwise that they don't otherwise follow in order to justify anti gay prejudice. His point is there are all kinds of laws and rules and norms in the Bible that we don't follow. Why have they chosen these statements about gay people to obsess about?
She wrote this focusing on a couple of clobber verses here and there.
But ignoring the fact that the Torah commands us no less than 36 times to love and care for the stranger in our midst is an absolute desecration of the sacred, in my opinion.
Or ignoring the demands from Deuteronomy through the prophets to protect those most marginalized in our society.
Talk about missing the point of everyone is created in the divine image.
This is Jesus point.
When he eats with Zacchaeus, he is making this bigger theological argument that everybody belongs.
And he's pointing out how we use our socially and culturally made rules and laws and norms to exclude people when we are afraid.
Paul picks up this argument later in Ephesians 2, and we don't have time to visit it.
But Paul takes Jesus's gospel of including people like Zacchaeus and he says that what Jesus is actually doing is he's creating a new humanity.
That's exactly how he puts it back in Galatians, chapter two. Paul says this because of Jesus. In Jesus's Gospel, there is no Jew, nor Greek, nor slave, nor free, or male or female. For all Our one, because of Christ Jesus, none of those distinctions matter anymore.
It doesn't matter anymore. If. If you are a Jew or a Greek, a man or a woman, gay or straight, American or Mexican, citizen or undocumented, rich or poor, it does not matter.
These are divisions that we retreat to when we are afraid.
The beauty of Jesus gospel is that it tells us that we don't have to be afraid anymore.
Aren't you tired of being afraid?
Aren't you tired of being told that you have to fear people who are just trying to get by every day, just like you?
Paul says that because of this, because Jesus radically included everybody, we are now one.
More than that, we are made whole by each other.
Consider the possibility that because of this gospel, because we are able to be included by the grace and the goodness of God, that these things that we have weaponized against each other, these differences that we have used to exclude, are not actually things that we should fear, but that they are gifts that we should embrace.
That I am made whole by your difference.
That I am made whole by your gender. That I am made whole by your gifts and abilities that I don't possess but I need in order for me to live a good and filled life, that I am made whole by your race that is different than mine. That I am made whole by your cultural ethnicity that is different than that. I, as a straight, white CIS guy, am made whole because I have you, a gay or a lesbian or transgender person in my life.
That I am made whole by having people in my community who are so utterly different from me that I can't possibly begin to understand why you would live the way that you do or make the decisions that you do or love who you do.
Until we sit down and eat together and I learn and I say, oh, well, that makes sense.
Me too.
The beauty of this sort of approach to, like, creating a community that is one not in spite of, but because of its differences, is that in that community I am no longer afraid.
I don't have to be afraid of who you are. I can delight in your differences because they create safety for me.
They create belonging for me.
They create wholeness for me.
I am not a big fan of churches or pastors who say things like, the hope of the world is the church, because, man, have we fallen short of that.
But listen, if we could have a community of authentic belonging, genuine, authentic belonging. Or we weren't afraid of each other's differences. We weren't afraid of each other's cultures, we weren't afraid of each other's genders and sexualities and perspectives. If we could create that kind of community, man, that would be a very powerful community in a world that is increasingly afraid and isolated and tribalized.
I mean, that's why I'm here.
I mean, that and the, you know, private jet and six figure paycheck.
Could y' all step it up because I don't have an indoor pool.
Listen, this church is already more than I ever could have hoped for.
This is the church I've always wanted to belong to.
I would be happy for any one of you to get up here and preach every Sunday.
I don't need to do this, but I do need this. I do need you.
And I think we need each other.
So let's just quit with the fear and the judgment and the exclusion, okay?
Amen. Let's pray.
God, we thank you so much for today and for this opportunity for us to gather.
We confess that we are not very good at this thing of not judging.
It's just so incredibly natural for us to slip into a place of judging each other because it makes us feel safer and more secure.
And I am deeply uncomfortable when I'm sitting across the table from somebody I don't understand.
And so, God, my prayer today is that you would make us more uncomfortable.
That we would have the courage to belong to a community in which everyone can belong, starting with those who have been excluded.
We pray all this in Jesus name.
Amen.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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