[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
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 you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Good morning.
What a joy and a privilege it is.
Together with you.
I greet you indeed on behalf of General Mr. And President Theresa Hort Owens. She is on sabbatical. She is obeying God's command to rest and so I have the joy of being here. But indeed she sends her love and congratulations even in her absence.
Will you I just. If we could just have like raucous applause for the spiritual audacity 150 years.
Spiritual audacity for 150 years.
My God.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
We could have ruckus applause for much longer, but I won't keep us.
Will you join me in an attitude of prayer?
Spirit of the living God.
God who we've encountered in with our voices as we have sung together.
The God that we have encountered as we've celebrated. The audacious leaders, Lord, that have served faithfully and well in this place. The God who we have encountered in the smiles and hugs and handshakes and presence of your people this morning. Spirit of the living God.
Fall fresh Spirit of the God who was before before, who is present here and now and who will take them into the next 150 years.
Lord, we invite you to fall fresh.
Spirit of the living God.
Oh God, I affirm that your word is more than poetry. Your word is more than prose. It's the only word that gives us life and liberty everlasting.
The only word that overcomes death in all its forms. Teach us. Speak clearly, deeply and powerfully in Jesus name.
Amen.
Amen. Amen.
Friends, I just am so delighted. I want to give thanks for your co leaders.
They're back there.
Reverend Jason and Reverend Janelle.
I'm clear that they don't just extend the red carpet for me, but they have.
It's clear that's an ethic. That's something they do for one and all. And so thank you. It's still precious to me though. I know I'm not just special in that way, but thank you all so much. Friends, let's in our hearing, I want to invite us to hear Psalm 46.
I'm told that it is written by the sons of Korah, though if I Didn't know that. I would think. It was written by Oceanside Sanctuary.
It reads, God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear. Though the earth should change, Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, Though its waters roar and foam, Though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
Salah, pause. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city. It shall not be moved. God will help it. When the morning dawns, the nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter. God utters God's voice. The earth melts. The Lord of Hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. Salah, come behold the works of the Lord. See what desolations God has brought on the earth. God makes war cease to the end of the Earth. God breaks the bow and shatters the spear. Burns the fields, the shields with fire.
Be still and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations. I am exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with. With us.
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah, the word of God for the people of God.
Thanks be to God.
This song written by the sons of Korah in the 40th chapter of Psalms, it reminds me indeed of Oceanside Sanctuary. Because I read it, friends. I read it as a song to stir the oceans.
A song to stir the oceans. Not a song of conquests, indeed a song of refuge, but a song to stir the oceans. It reminded me of a song that you may know, famously sung, though not written by Louis Armstrong. Perhaps you've heard of him.
It's a song entitled what a Wonderful World.
Yeah. I see trees of green Red roses too I see them bloom from me and you and I think to myself yeah I see skies of blue Clouds of white the bright blessed day the dark sacred night and I think to myself the colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky Are also on the faces of the people going by. I see friends shaking hands, right? Saying, how do you do? But what they're really saying is I love you I hear babies crying I watch them grow they'll learn so much more Than I will ever know and I think to myself it's recorded in 1967, not the year of peace and tranquility, as you well know.
He was actually in Las Vegas, had just done a show, and at 2am they invited him to record this incredible song.
And they had a session from 2am to 6 in the morning.
This is a time, right, this late 60s, there's national trauma and civil unrest.
The Vietnam War had been going on since the.
And it raged on through the 70s. There Kennedy would be assassinated and the head of ABC Records, his record label, he didn't think this was a good song to release.
What a Wonderful World.
Among national trauma, war, tension and unrest, what a Wonderful World. It topped the charts in 68 in the UK.
It did amazingly all over the world.
The song kind of bombed here.
His witness, his vision, the song that would stir so much and that clearly, you know, it, we know, didn't perform this way at the outset. It was made popular, right? This. This movie, Good Morning Vietnam.
It made it popular again and so it was re released as a. In 1988.
And so we've come to know it and indeed it has stood the test of time.
As we hear this song, I want us to consider, right? Just as we gather to bear witness to 150 years of vision, 150 years of having eyes to see what only God gives us the eyes to see, right?
Love, sanctuary, refuge.
To celebrate, right? What we hear, what we see, right? He says, I see. And then he says, and I hear, and I think I see and I hear and I think.
We gather, right? To celebrate beauty and grace and possibility and seeing those things when sometimes, right? The world tells us that song isn't current for today.
We don't have space for it to amplify it.
We don't quite understand why you would sing that way.
And yet, just as Louis Armstrong did, you've done so. You're witness to God's refuge. You're witness to God's love.
You're witness to the voice and the work and the audacious love.
A love that's deeper than death, a love that goes beyond the forces of division and destruction, right? A love that plows forward with justice, that says, there's more than enough for one and for all.
You've kept singing it.
You've kept singing it and you've kept saying, no, no, I can see it and I can hear it. And I can keep thinking to myself, There's a world full of wonder that we will proclaim. A world full of wonder that we will serve, that we will take action to create when no one else will.
I want us to notice, right? The song of Psalms 46 by the sons of Korah.
It's not just a song. It begins, right? It begins by celebrating this God of refuge, this declaration that God is the God of refuge of all and one and one and all.
But I believe, friends, it's also the song of Oceanside Sanctuary, that it's a song that stirs the oceans. Because it's a song that transforms the landscape.
It transforms the landscape and it changes us.
Water, right?
You'll recall with me, right, that water is invoked.
It's a constant, right? In the biblical narrative, right? The God that parted the Red Sea in the Exodus moment, right? The God that stirred the oceans and spoke into voids that were moaning in the beginning.
That God, the psalmist is saying, is still singing, that God is still at work, that God is still a refuge, right? When the nations are in an uproar, right? And the oceans are stirring, that God sings a song that makes war cease.
And that action I want to offer, it's not occasioned by crisis, right? It's not just a song of crisis, right? But it's a song, right, that calls us to be still and to know this God that is yet at work.
I want to be clear, right, that this call to be still and know is not a call. It's not about a project of indifference.
He's not a God that is calling us to be distant, but a God who is ever present.
Being still and knowing is not a command or an invitation to withdraw or even to Sabbath rest.
This God is saying, right? Be still and know. He is speaking to the powers of the world. To be still and know my answers to the destruction and death in the world.
This God is stirring the oceans, right? Water always plays a crucial role, right? It's a metaphor for Torah, right? It's a metaphor for instruction and teaching, right? We need water for washing our hands. We need water for purification and baptism.
We don't see anybody die in the song, right? It does say, right, that things happen to the land and the mountains and God makes war stop, but nobody dies, which is a strange thing to say these days, but hallelujah, right? We see a God of refuge transforming the landscape and transforming the people.
And we see what is indeed an old song, right? We gather, right, to celebrate an old song, an old ocean, but to celebrate not just simply the passage of time, but to celebrate the stirring of the waters and the changing of the landscape, the stirring that calls us forward, right? Together anew.
I want to invite us to hear. There's a beautiful poet that I love by the name of Tracy King Smith, and she wrote a book entitled Wade in the Water.
And this short poem, I promise it's short, is entitled An Old Story.
She says, we were made to Understand, it would be terrible.
Every small want, every niggling urge, every hate swollen to a kind of epic win, Livid the land and ravaged like a rageful dream, the worst in us having taken over and broken the rest utterly down.
A long age passed when at last we knew how little would survive us, how little we had mended or built that was not now lost but just. Then something large and old awoke. And then our singing brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone. They crept down from trees.
We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
Singing about this God of refuge, singing about this ever present God. It, too, your singing here, it's brought on a different manner of weather.
Hallelujah.
It's a song, not just song. And I want to note, right, that the historians, right, will tell us that Jerusalem was attacked in 701, and that's what occasioned this psalm.
But I know that you're singing about a God, right, who provides sanctuary. It's not just a crisis song.
It's a song you sing every day.
It's a song you practice every day.
Rebecca Solnit, somebody I love, she has this sort of observation, right, about Judeo, Christian culture's central story. And she says we often, right, we talk about paradise and the fall. We talk about perfection and loss.
And then often we talk about paradise as a kind of static, you know, place that was stolen, that we're trying to recover.
She says this idea of perfection is also why a lot of people believe in saving or going home or as crisis response rather than everyday practice.
I rejoice because I know you don't talk about sanctuary. You don't practice sanctuary as crisis response, right? You know, it's not. This isn't a song about paradise, but about presence. It's not a fixed place, but a connected, deeply rooted, transformed place.
It is your steady and enduring witness. It is a song, deeply rooted, right, 150-year-old roots that you practice and sing together with beauty and grace that transforms the landscape.
It's that song that stirs, right, the oceans, the song that you sing. What I found out, if a song can only be sung on your best day, it's not your best song.
If you can only sing a song on your best day, it's not your best song. Your best songs are the songs you can sing on your worst day and your best day. Hallelujah. Together we gather.
We gather indeed to sing and to study this 150-year-old song, right? The songs, right? This old story don't just tell an old story, but they bring a different manner of weather, a different atmosphere, a different set of conditions for flourishing for our community.
They set a different table for God's love to be shared.
They spark new songs that stir the oceans. Of God's waters, right? Of God's Torah, of God's teaching within and between and among us. They stir waters that transform Oceanside and Carlsbad and Kent Pendleton in California.
It's a song that not only stirs the oceans, but. But a song to change the world, right? This invocation of God's refuge and God's strength, it's not a passive guarantee, right, that God is just gonna come and save us, right? But it's a disorienting and reorienting song that roots us deeply. Hallelujah.
So we can continue to be a force that stirs the oceans for years to come.
Amen. Amen. God bless you.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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