[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.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Good morning. For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason Kilker. I'm one of the co lead pastors here at the Ocean side Sanctuary along with Janelle. And we had started just before MLK Sunday, a series on our core values here at the church. And so I'm going to pick that back up again today. For those of you who are new, if this is your first Sunday, then you may have missed that first week that's available online. You can go back and see that particular teaching. But we do have a series of core values here that essentially articulate what we really care about the most. And I apologize if I stop and sort of cough and struggle. I'm like 95% better. I'm not, excuse me, I'm not contagious anymore, I promise.
But when I get sick, it tends to like end up in my chest and then I have a cough for like weeks at a time. So apologies in advance if that is distracting.
Today we're going to take a look at our second value. Our second core value. And these came out of our process last year in 2025, where you all, if you were here, engaged in a process of sort of evolving or iterating our mission and vision here at the Oceanside Sanctuary. This is something we do about every five years we discern together as a church. Where do we think the spirit of God is leading us for the next five year period?
We just did that in 2025. And so what came out of that was a series of core values. And today we're going to look at value number two, which is this. It's integrated spirituality.
Integrated spirituality. And if you don't know what that means, that's okay. I'm going to do my best to unpack that for you today. But here's the way we articulate it in our expression of vision and mission. It says, because God in Christ embodies the fullness of divine humanity, we embrace an evolving faith that is thoughtfully curious, spiritually rooted and united in love and purpose. What you might have picked up there is that this idea of integrated spirituality is deeply rooted in a kind of doctrine called the Incarnation.
The Incarnation is just our way theologically of saying that as Christians, we believe that Christ embodies God, that God is present in the body of Christ. And that alone says a lot about what it means to be human and what God values. And in particular, what it means is that God was willing to inhabit flesh, that our bodies, that the created order is a good thing. So that's where we're going today. I want to share with you a passage that I think is relevant to this idea of an integrated spirituality as opposed to a segregated spirituality. Before we jump in, would you just say a prayer with me, please?
God, we thank you again for today. We thank you for this opportunity for us to gather here on the corner of Freeman and Topeka and Oceanside, where so many people have gathered every Sunday for nearly a hundred years to worship in this space.
We ask that you would root us in a sense of connection not just to you, not just to each other, but to the tradition that represents the generation after generation. People have sought to put you at the top of their lives. Your goodness, your righteousness, your peace, and that we have sought to align our lives with your goodness.
We pray that we would stand in that same spirit, that we would seek to be joined with you, aligned with you, and integrated with a sense of your goodness. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
Okay, so like a lot of people who become Christians in their early 20s, you know, Janelle and I were raised in church, right? Janelle was raised Southern Baptist. I was raised Calvary Chapel. If you don't know what Calvary Chapel is, there's one about a block up the street. Very like, you know, fundamentalist, evangelical, technically. Technically, Calvary Chapels are Pentecostal, which you wouldn't know it if you went to a Calvary Chapel or. But they're rooted in the Assemblies of God tradition. That's the tradition I was raised in. Janelle's raised Southern Baptist. And then we met as teenagers. I'm not here to tell you our whole story, but we met in high school as teenagers. And at that time, I had sort of rejected Christianity. I thought it was all a bunch of foolishness.
And then we got married very young. It turns out that I was a terrible husband. And I was like, oh, I probably should, you know, figure out how to be a better human being. And then I became a Christian again.
And I did something that I think a lot of Christians, when they sort of become Christians in their early 20s, especially guys become Christians in their early 20s or sort of renew their faith in their early 20s. I decided that there are a lot of things in my life that just weren't holy, namely our music, right? So at some point I came home, I was about 21, probably came home from a Bible study at our like independent Pentecostal church in the mountains of Utah and told Janelle, I'm sorry, we have to get rid of our devil music.
And we had collected a lot of devil music at this point. Like for a long period of time in my late teens and early twenties, I was a ticket scalper. That's what I did for a living, like in the LA area. That's a fun story. But the point is that I was very into music and I loved classic rock, I loved Led Zeppelin and I loved Bob. Mentioned Kiss earlier today. I saw a meme this week that said Kiss are really just Juggalos for baby boomers. And I'll never forget that.
Now that's how I'm going to see Kiss for the rest of my life.
But we had Janis Joplin live at the Hollywood bowl was, was one of the CDs that we had. And we had, you know, Rush and we had Led Zeppelin and we had, you know, the Doors. You know, like Every self respecting 17 year old stoner kid, I discovered the Doors and like, you know, bought all the doors CDs I possibly could. We had all of this great music.
And then one day I came home and said, this is all devil music. I'm sorry it all has to go. And I think I made a real show of like throwing them all in a dumpster and lighting them on fire or something like that.
How could you?
Amen.
Bob is a DJ for a classic rock radio station. For those of you who didn't know.
Now this was before. This was before streaming, right? So like once that stuff was gone, it was gone and we were too poor to replace it all. When later we like grew up and realized, oh my gosh, you don't have to do that.
We didn't know yet. We didn't know that all of life and all of art and all of culture is holy and sanctified.
We didn't know that yet. We thought there were certain aspects of your life that were holy and other aspects of your life that were profane. We thought there were certain aspects of life that were sacred and other aspects of life that were secular, some aspects of life that were godly and other aspects of life that were of the devil. We were categorizing all of life as things that were good and things that were bad and then trying to Eradicate those bad things from our lives. The intention here isn't bad. It's just foolish. We didn't discover yet, we hadn't discovered yet that every medicine is also a poison in the wrong dose.
And every poison is a medicine in the right dose.
And everything that is good for you is actually deadly if you consume too much of it.
This is just true of everything. This is why when you get into the deep wisdom of Ecclesiastes, right, The author of Ecclesiastes, Qohelet, the preacher says, it's not good to be too righteous or too wise. You'll destroy yourself.
Even too much of God is not a good thing.
Just like too much water can kill you.
The very thing that you need to survive, that if you don't have water for three days, you will die. But if you drink too much water all at once, you also will die.
This is a fairly, like, revolutionary idea when you discover it that God created all of life, and all of life, therefore is good.
You just have to figure out where things belong and how much of it you need.
Okay, so that's my whole sermon in a nutshell, right? Like, you could just scroll the rest of the time now if you wanted to.
But there's a good passage, I think, for, like, easing into this idea that spirituality is actually integrated when it's truly healthy. And that passage, coincidentally, is a passage that we have already recited today.
It's the Lord's prayer, Matthew, chapter 6, verses 5 through 15. We'll put it up on the screen in a moment. We've already said it together, and most of you at some point in your life, for some reason, have memorized this prayer. So to a certain extent. Extent you know it.
But before we jump into that, there's something I want to tell you about the way that I view the Lord's Prayer that might be helpful. The first thing that you need to know is that I am the kind of Christian, the kind of pastor who believes in a canon within a canon. Right now, the canon is the, like, authorized scripture, right? The canon is this. If you're a Protestant, this is the canon. If you're a Catholic, this is missing some interesting books, right? We won't get into that. That's not what today's sermon is about. Right. The point is, is that when we talk about the canon, what we mean is, like, you know, like in the mcu, there are certain stories and characters that are canon. You know that, right? Or in the Star wars universe, there are certain things that are considered canon because they're like authorized. Well, that's where that term comes from. There are certain books in the Bible that are considered authorized that tradition says are reliable and true. We call it a canon.
However, I tend to subscribe to the idea that there is a canon within the canon.
That while, yes, all of Scripture is good and useful and helpful for developing wisdom, that within Scripture, as Christians, the New Testament is more relevant to our spiritual life than the Hebrew Bible because we are not Jewish, we are Christian, and the New Testament was written for people who follow Jesus.
But even within that canon, within the New Testament, I think that there are books in the New Testament that are more important, specifically the Gospels, because the Gospels tell us about the life and the teachings and the works of Jesus. And as Christians, we literally are people who are trying to follow Jesus's life and teachings. And within even the Gospels, there is something that I think is a canon within the Gospels, and that is the Sermon on the Mount.
Everywhere Jesus went, the Sermon on the Mount is the core of what he taught. You find it in Matthew, chapter five and six and seven, and also similarly in Luke, three chapters in Luke that convey the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus essential teaching. If there was one thing that you could take with you to a desert island, what I would give you is the Sermon on the Mount. If you could just have the Sermon on the Mount, you. You would have all that you need.
Now, you don't have to agree with this.
This might be rubbing you the wrong way, but I just want you to know this is my bias, that when I turn to Scripture, I place more weight, more priority on the words of Jesus than anything else.
And within the Sermon on the Mount, there is a canon within that canon as well.
And in my opinion, the canon within the canon of the Sermon on the Mount is the Lord's Prayer.
If there is any one snippet of Scripture that conveys the totality of the spirit of Jesus and Jesus teachings, it is the Lord's Prayer.
And that is not a coincidence, because the Lord's Prayer is Jesus prayer that he, as a rabbi, gives to his students. In fact, this was normal practice.
Normal practice in the ancient near east was if you were the follower of a particular rabbi, it would be common. It would be normal for you as a disciple, as a student of that rabbi, to say, rabbi, teach us to pray.
Now, what's delightful, what's. What's beautiful about that question is, if you were raised Jewish in the ancient near east, you had lots of prayers in your pocket.
You probably had the Kaddish memorized, which is a sort of rote prayer that Jews pray when they are in mourning, which, by the way, resembles the Lord's Prayer a lot.
But there are lots of other prayers as well that you probably would have known. But if you have a rabbi, a particular rabbi, a teacher that you follow, you want that rabbi to tell you what their prayer formula is.
And that is what the Lord's prayer is. It is Jesus's standard structure of prayer that he gave to his followers. And as a standard prayer, it is not an incantation.
It's not a magic formula for getting what you want.
You know, maybe for you, prayer is when you're like, oh, my God, I really need a raise.
God, please give me that raise. I mean, pray that, please, all you want. I hope you get the raise.
But that is not what prayer is in Jesus's tradition. It's not our magic petition to get the things that we want out of life. Instead, prayer is how we align ourselves with what is good, with what is God.
And so these prayers that were given by rabbis to their students were a kind of pocket theology, like a handy way for you to, like, reach into your pocket and say, oh, yeah, I want to remind myself what is good and what is right and what is true. And this is a helpful way for me to pray through that, to begin to embody how the world actually works.
So with that in mind, let's read the Lord's Prayer again.
Matthew, chapter 6, verses 9, says this. Jesus says, pray then in this way.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
That's it.
That's the whole prayer.
That's the essence of Jesus theology. It's the essence of Jesus spiritual life and Jesus spiritual practices.
And here's what I notice about it.
I notice that it begins, like virtually all ancient Jewish prayers. It begins by lifting up the name of God as hallowed or sacred or holy. And in doing this, it establishes from the outset something really critical and important. And that is the idea that God as Father. You've heard this before, that God as Father is kind of close to us.
This, by the way, would have been like a bit of a.
What's the word? Would have been like a bit of a debate in Jesus's day. You've heard me say this before, there were two schools of rabbinical thought at that time, the school of Shammai and the School of Hillel. These are two famous rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, and Shema and Hillel were like the Republicans and Democrats of their day.
Or like, if that, you know, if you don't like that phraseology, they're like the, you know, Mac versus windows of their day, right?
And the school of Shammai. Rabbi Shammai tended to be more austere, more strict, more literal in his interpretation of Scripture, really cautious and careful to, like, keep the. Not the letter of the law in all instances. But Rabbi Hillel was sort of the opposite, right? Rabbi Hillel was more concerned with the spirit of the law, tended to be a little bit more flexible, a little bit less concerned about the rigid letter of the law and more concerned with following the spirit of the law.
It really is a kind of like liberalism versus conservatism.
And the beauty of Jesus is throughout Jesus's teachings, he's often speaking to the debate between these two schools. And Jesus does not consistently side with one over the other.
Sometimes Jesus sides with Shammai. Sometimes Jesus sides with Hillel. In this case, he sides with Hillel.
God ought to be considered a God who is close, kind, and caring, like a good Father.
And so he begins his prayer, his prayer of theology with this idea that God is the ultimate source of goodness, the ultimate source of righteousness, the ultimate source of peace. And that God is like a good father doesn't mean that God is the man, just means God is like a good father.
And so that sets the tone for the whole prayer. And then Jesus jumps second number two, verse 10, into something that establishes Jesus's very distinctive flavor of his theology, and that is this verse 10.
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And in this, Jesus uses a classical sort of parallel structure where one half of the verse sort of illustrates or explains the second half of the verse. Your kingdom come, your will be done.
In other words, God's kingdom, which is God's rule or God's power. God's ability to get God's way in the world is God's kingdom, God's will. Jesus says, your will, your power, your goodness be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In other words, Jesus establishes that his teaching, his spirituality is about not waiting for someday when we die and we go and we live in a place where God gets God's way, but here is just the place where we have to endure the fact that like the devil is in charge.
No, Jesus says, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus establishes that he is a fancy word, is he is an eschatological prophet.
He's an apocalyptic prophet, because he sees the power of God coming now.
So the rest of this prayer is not going to be about what we're waiting for. Someday when we die and, like, fly away, our spirits fly to heaven, and then we discover, like, paradise. No, Jesus entire prayer is to be understood in this way that God is good and that God's goodness and power are meant to come now to our lives.
And then he gets into what I think is really the most interesting bit.
What does it look like when God's power comes to earth just as it is in heaven? Jesus says, verse 11, Give us this day our daily bread.
So what does it look like when God's power comes?
What does it look like when God gets God's way in the world? Well, it looks like hungry people being fed.
That's what it looks like.
It doesn't look like, you know, like people shaking on stage from the power of God or like, praying in tongues or like, you know, falling over, like Benny Hinn knocking over, like, a crowd of people.
Come on. Now, you guys have seen that on YouTube.
Janelle and I were in that church for kind of like that kind of church for a very long time.
That's not what the power of God looks like. Jesus says when the power of God comes, when God gets God's way, it looks like hungry people being fed.
That's good news.
Listen, like, when I got the good news, the good news of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, the good news of Christianity, it sounded something like this, Jason. If you just pray and ask Jesus to come into your heart, he stands at the door and he knocks. And if you will open the door and let Jesus in, then one day when you die, you will go to heaven and be with Jesus forever.
Try giving that gospel to starving people.
Try giving that gospel to Alex Preddy's family or Renee Good's family, or the families that are being torn apart and ripped from their communities because of the color of their skin or the documentation of their citizenship.
Jesus begins right out the gate with an expression of the gospel that is, in my opinion, deeply political.
Because whether hungry people have access to food.
I don't know if you know this, and maybe you don't even agree with this, but, you know, if people are hungry, if they are starving, if they don't have access to Food, it's not because they're lazy.
All over the world if people are hungry, if people are starving, if they don't have access to food, it's not cause they didn't go to college and get a six figure job.
People on this earth are hungry and starving because of political structures, because of laws and policies, because of obstacles that were created by people with power.
Famines exist on this world not because of the weather or because of climate, but because of wars right out of the gate. When Jesus is giving us his pocket theology, he begins his expression of the Gospel with policies, with politics.
There's a reason why in the Hebrew Bible, when Moses wanted to address the issue of poverty, he said, if you're rich and you have a big field where you grow all your grain, set aside a corner of that field for the poor.
Because Moses understood that poverty was largely a function of structure, of policies, of politics.
And so he codified into law ways for poor people to have access to food.
Jesus got in trouble when he and his disciples walked through a field and exercised their rights as poor people to pick the heads of grain off of the wheat and rub it between their hands, pull the kernels and eat it. In doing that, Jesus and his disciples were doing what poor people had the legal right to do. It was the welfare of his day.
Jesus understood what Moses understood, which is poverty is largely a product of politics.
And therefore our solutions to poverty and hunger must also be political.
And so I just think this is scandalous that Jesus would begin to describe the effects of the power of God coming to earth first and foremost as political.
But he doesn't stop there.
Verse 12 he goes on after saying, give us this day our daily bread, verse 12 he says, and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Jesus moves from the realm of politics to the social realm.
He says, yeah, the world is broken politically. The world is broken in ways that produce poor people. But the world is also broken socially.
Have you noticed that you and I have a tendency when somebody owes us something, when somebody has wronged us in some way, when somebody has harmed us in some way, that we are slow to forgive?
Jesus addresses that too.
Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Jesus establishes that a life that is good, a life that is spiritual, a life that is true, is a life that recognizes the truth. That my forgiveness is bound up in your forgiveness too.
That there is a reciprocity of mutual grace and forgiveness that keeps the engine of peaceful society moving along. That when you owe Me something, my willingness to forgive.
It's an investment in a society that is willing to forgive.
This means that I can be safe and secure in a society knowing that if I really screw up, if I really blow it, if I really hurt you in some way, if I owe you money, that I'll never be able to pay back. That there is built into that social order a way to relieve the pressure.
This too is bound up with politics.
In the Hebrew Bible. The other way that Moses dealt with this sort of thing was he built in that every 49 years all the debts in their society would be forgiven.
It was the year of jubilee.
Moses seemed to understand that every so often we needed to be able to forgive each other.
So Jesus addresses his theology to the political and to the social. And then, you know, just when we think maybe Jesus is a liberal, verse 13 comes along and he says very unhelpfully, do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
This is a deeply personal spirituality.
This is a theology that says, yes, poverty can be the result of politics and policies. And, you know, lack of forgiveness is a problem at the social level. But have you noticed that you, as an individual tend to fall into temptation?
Have you noticed that you, as an individual, sometimes have a habit of being self destructive?
So there's like personal holiness in here too.
And listen, this is a progressive church. We don't like to talk about personal sin.
Like, if you want to take a little wine with your dinner, you know, you want to, you know, engage in a little bit of personal licentiousness.
Yeah, we don't care.
Tina cares.
I don't care.
This gets deeply uncomfortable because in religious spaces like this. Hello. This is a religious space space, right.
In religious spaces, we tend to use personal piety and personal holiness and personal obedience as a kind of weapon to control you, to tell you who you can love and who you can't love, to tell you whether or not you can drink or smoke or chew or go with girls that do. Right.
We tend to use the.
The cudgel of personal sin as a way to beat you into a sense of shame and submission.
But it is true, I think I've noticed in myself that I have a tendency to act and behave and speak in ways that are hurtful to myself and sometimes to others.
And ironically, like the people that I tend to be hurtful towards the most are like the people that I claim to love the most.
The people I live with, the children that I raised, the grandchildren that, you know, I Get to spend time with a couple days a week. The church members that I am in community with.
These are the people, the people that I say I love that I have a tendency sometimes to hurt the most. And that is because I really am broken.
I really am.
I've got my traumas just like you.
My parents did their best, which is to say they totally screwed me up.
I have unhealthy desires right alongside desires that are good.
I have a tendency to, like, fall prey to certain habits and patterns of relating to other people that perpetuate dependencies and codependencies and abuses.
I hate that about myself.
Part of Jesus prayer is a prayer that involves us coming to God with those tendencies.
So I don't know if you've noticed, but this neat little prayer tends to run the entire gamut of human existence top to bottom, from the personal to the political and the social in between.
And by the way, it also fits fairly neatly into, like, Maslow's ladder of needs.
Like it. It follows the entire hierarchy from basic needs for like, food and shelter and safety. On the one hand, right, that's where Jesus is talking about daily bread.
And then according to Maslow's ladder of needs, the next thing up is like, love and belonging, right? Belonging to a community that accepts you. That's the forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And then, you know, Maslow sort of tops his little pyramid. Maslow didn't create the pyramid, somebody else did. But at the top of his ladder is like self actualization, you know, like becoming all that you could possibly be.
And that's where Jesus ends with, like, lead me not into temptation. Let me become the person that I'm capable of becoming.
And you know what's interesting is that like, in religious spaces, we tend to start with the personal and then hope that a good society will result. But Jesus starts with the political.
Because like Maslow, Jesus understands that if you don't have food in your belly, you can't possibly worry about forgiving somebody who has harmed you. And if you don't have love and belonging, you don't have the luxury of becoming your belly best self.
If you belong to a church, that's all about preaching a personal gospel of personal self actualization.
You know, you're in a rich church.
Because only wealthy people have the luxury of focusing entirely on self perfection.
Jesus's gospel instead covers the whole gamut.
Sin infects every single realm of human existence, and therefore so does the gospel.
I love the way Richard Rohr describes this in his book Everything Belongs, he says this, in God's reign, that is God's rule, God's power.
In God's reign, everything belongs, even the broken and poor parts.
Until we have admitted this in our own souls, we will usually perpetuate exclusionary systems, systems and dualistic thinking in the outer world of politics and class, and sometimes even in church.
I love how he says sometimes even in church, without a hint of irony, because we're so good at this. We're so good at creating segregated spiritualities in church.
Here, what we try to lean into, what we try to embrace is an integrated spirituality where every aspect of human existence is recognized as good and spiritual.
And because sin and brokenness and harm and trauma infect every aspect of human existence, the gospel also invades every aspect of human existence.
So yeah, you better believe that. I'm going to tell you that you should stop behaving in ways that hurt you.
And I'm going to tell you that we should learn to love and forgive each other and accept each other. And I also will tell you that the gospel is pouring out into the streets with signs that say ice out.
Because that is sin too.
Tearing our communities apart through policies and laws, hurting people, removing children from their families, shooting mothers in the face in open.
That is sin. Just as much as my tendency to smoke a cigarette when I've had too much to drink.
Janelle didn't know I was going to say that.
But here's the thing.
Everything belongs.
All of it.
My individual issues, my political issues, my social issues, my good traits, my not so good traits, all of it belongs.
Amen.
Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you so much for today, for this opportunity for us to come before you and bring our hearts and our minds.
To this text.
I'm especially grateful for how when we sit beneath words like the Lord's Prayer, it has a tendency to just shine a light into every corner of our lives.
And I know that it's you shining that light when what I feel is hope and inspiration instead of shame.
So, God, we're thankful that every bit of our existence, every bit of ourselves belongs in our spirituality.
That your gospel addresses every bit of brokenness in our personal lives, in our relationships, and in our politics.
We ask that you would help this church, this community to lean into the holistic goodness of your love and your gospel. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in to learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
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