[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 you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Well, hello, my name is Janelle Coker, and I am one of the co lead ministers here.
And today I get the honor and privilege of continuing our series on practices for resurrection.
So before we begin, can we just pray mostly so I can ground myself up here today, but maybe you can pray with me and for me.
God, our creator, we come here in community today to proclaim that you are good, to proclaim that we see your goodness in each other.
Be with us this morning as we take whatever we need to take in to walk in love and grace in Jesus name.
Amen.
Okay, so I kind of like to do show of hands so I can see where you all are at.
So this is very important.
By a show of hands, if you are a person that when you have a true day off from work or whatever things you have going on, if you're retired from all of your appointments and you the day before or sometimes the week before, want to plan that day out, you want to know what you are doing on your day off, raise your hand.
Okay. Okay.
Now, if you are a person that it's your day off, that would be ridiculous to plan something. Could you please raise your hand? Okay. More of you.
Okay. Now, can you tell me if you are married to or have a partner or a good friend you do things with that is the exact opposite of you?
Okay. Okay.
So Jason and I typically take Fridays off together. And on Thursday night, I'm like, so, what are we going to do tomorrow?
And Jason, this has been you guys. We've been together 33 years, married 33 years, together. Longer than that. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I know that it's a day off. Why would he plan?
But I also know it's a day off we get to plan. So I'll say, like, what do you want to do? And he'll go, I don't know. What do you want to do?
And I'll go, I mean, there's so many things we could do. We have weeds outside. We could be pulling weeds. We could, like, ride our bikes to the beach. We could. And I give him like 20 things and he's like, pick one.
So that's our Thursday night Friday morning. However, there's also something that I really enjoy doing, which is knowing that it's a day off and that while we made plans the night before, I might wake up on Friday and feel differently.
And so Jason says, I do this 90% of the time. That is a lie from the pit of hell.
I want to say that probably 25% of the time I wake up and go, you know what? I think I just want to lay in bed and drink coffee and watch a movie. I don't want to pull weeds today.
And he'll go, sounds great.
That's what makes our marriage work. And while I know many of you right now are feeling sorry for Jason, I'd like to state my case about what this story has to to do with spiritual formation, because that is what our series is about. Spiritual practices for resurrection.
I think that structures can be absolutely essential for providing shape, for giving us hope, for what we're doing, for helping us to know what we're doing and how to work our faith around a structure.
But too much structure, especially structure that is dictated to you by someone else, can then become a taskmaster that keeps you from experiencing Christ fully.
This entire sermon series came about because over, I want to say, the last six or eight months, many of you have said to me something like this, I love this church. I left a more controlling and rigid form of religion and I found this space to be so open and I can be who I am and I don't have to pretend. And I just love it. I don't feel nearly the shame that I used to, but I don't have a list of things I'm supposed to do. Can you do a sermon series on a list of things that I'm supposed to do, please?
And you know, so I wrote to Jason and said, okay, here's a six week series on a list of things people are supposed to do. Because I love a list, I love some things to do.
And so we have like, I think a great lineup. Jason spoke about fasting last week. We have Larry, who's going to preach about an examination. I, right now am supposed to be preaching to you on how to pray the psalms.
And we're not going to get there yet. We will get there at the end of this sermon, but on week two of this series, even though it's not matching what I wrote, because I love to have a framework, but then I don't follow it. That's exactly. Everybody who's preaching in this six week series is like, wait a minute, I don't think this is what she's supposed to be talking about.
I could not let us go through a list of things to do without talking about something that I feel is extremely important, and that is Romans 8:1 and 2.
So it's going to be up for you on the screen here now.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.
Hold on here. I can't read my notes and yours as well, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life, has set you free from the law of sin and death.
So here's the truth.
We cannot start with a list of spiritual formation practices unless we understand that those spiritual formation practices start with no condemnation.
They start with freedom.
Look, we live in a world we're starting in kindergarten. We get little gold stars, we move on to school where we get A's, B's, C's, D's, F's, we go to work and we get paychecks of varying degrees based on all we've done. How many people like us? Are we a good communicator?
Did we pick a job that pays well, or did we go to school, get our doctorate, and make pennies because we wanted to help people?
These are the oceans that we swim in, ones of external signs of success.
And if all of that wasn't enough, then we started social media, where we get little hearts or poop emojis based on whether or not people think we're great or not so great?
It's extremely difficult to not bring this kind of world in which we live in and attribute it to who God is and what God expects from us.
We often believe that God is a God who's giving us hearts or poop. Emojis.
And I think that's why the kind of faith built around very strict and external expectations can be deceptive.
Because who doesn't like getting a heart, a pat on the back? Who doesn't like having somebody else say to them, good job, I think you're fitting in. You're doing it right.
When someone tells you how many Hail Marys to say what volunteer job you've been assigned to in the church that year, the exact passage that you should read and what time in the morning you should read it in, how much you should give to the church, and whether that's pre tax or post tax, it gives us a simple way, a horrible taskmaster way, to check off though the boxes that tell us if we are in or if we are out, if God loves us or if we're so broken that God, in fact thinks that we are horrible.
And all of this is because someone in authority told you that if you checked off that list just in the right way, in particular to that specific church's culture, that you would be loved by God.
And even if you didn't grow up in this type of religious system, you've likely felt the pull between personal freedom and external authority, that thing that tells you how to live, what to do, who to be, and that always you are not quite measuring up.
Guilt and shame is a very strong motivator.
I have a friend who left a very controlling form of evangelicalism quite a few years ago, and recently we were talking and she shared that at night she'll sometimes get into bed and start to take her day in and start to consider what she's done that day. She immediately gets out of bed and in the dark, gets on her knees and starts to try to pay penance for what she thinks she might have done wrong.
This is not a wild and crazy woman, y'all.
She imagines every little word she said. Did somebody maybe take that wrong?
Was her motivation one that wanted attention? Or was it one of full, kind, loving, giving?
She self flagellates over and over again, even though at times she doesn't even know that she believes in God at all.
She'll say to me, I just what if I'm wrong? What if this is what's expected of me? I was taught that I was dirty from the minute of my birth, that I was greasy and filthy, and that all I had to give were filthy rags.
I don't know about some of you, but I did leave a form of Christianity that said that exact thing to me.
You know, that I. If you've been around very long. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I love psychology and sociology and there is a study that talks about many studies actually that talk about the negativity bias.
Isn't it true that the bad stuff oftentimes sticks more to us than the good stuff?
It's actually a well documented psychological effect.
Negative experiences and information have often a greater influence on our thoughts and behaviors than positive ones.
So I'm aging myself here, but I'll never forget going to the theater and watching the movie Pretty Julia Roberts character Vivian Ward says the bad stuff is just easier to believe, don't you think?
I remember thinking, yes, it really is.
The psychologist Rick Hanson, who has done a lot of study around this, explains that the brain is like Velcro negative experiences, glob on.
But it's like the brain is also Like Teflon, when we hear, when we have positive experiences, sometimes those slip right off.
If you pair that with status quo bias, meaning that we often go back to what we're used to or what our bias tells us to believe about ourselves, it can be a prescription for a very dangerous way to practice spiritual formation.
And I don't think that this is something that only is being experienced during our lifetime. It's not just about hearts and likes.
Throughout the biblical context, we see the people of God moving from freedom back to captivity, from the knowledge that they don't have to be burdened under the law, back to the law. We see this with Exodus, with the people of God desiring to go back to Egypt. We see it in Nehemiah, where, or excuse me, in First Samuel, where God offers to be the king, a king of a kind and generous kingdom, but they ask for a king that is a man.
We see it in the Pharisees and their harshness of who gets to be in and who gets to be out.
And we see it in Galatians where Paul is writing to the church of Galatians and saying, wait a minute, you don't have to be under the law anymore. And in fact, I'd like to read a scripture verse in Galatians that says this.
So the law was our guardian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under the guardian.
What a lot of this around y'all, for those of you that don't know, is that the Galatian church was having a lot of people who were non Jewish coming in and wanting to be followers of Jesus, and they weren't circumcised.
And so trying to figure out if you could be in or out, if God would love you if you are a man but were not circumcised, they said they've got to be circumcised.
I want us to sit in this kind of religious malpractice for a minute.
These folks were coming with a desire to know God.
And the church in Galatians was saying, you have to have a surgery as an adult in a very uncomfortable place.
Circumcision in that moment was just. And really the leaders in that church was just a return to bondage. It was a return away from freedom, back into bondage.
So before we begin to talk about, and I promise I won't go too long, but before we begin to learn a spiritual practice that you may or may not already use, I have to ask you an important Question.
What belief system are you under right now when it comes to why you need to practice in the first place?
Do you believe that you need to check off some boxes?
That you need to stand under a self loathing burden?
God is continually saying to God's people, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Do you believe that when we practice spiritual practices, whether that be confession or prayer or fasting, and we think that it's going to somehow magically make God love us, it's the wrong thought entirely.
When we know that sitting at the feet of our Creator and practicing in a way that fills us with so much love, because God's love is perfect, that it permeates through our every pore.
That is where we come to practice.
Not to beat ourselves up, not to motivate ourselves with shame or guilt, not to check off boxes, and certainly not to get gold stars from somebody like me.
Jason talked about fasting last week and I can say that if we just provided a prescription of. Here are the spiritual practices that you must do.
Fasting, and specifically fasting from food, which is talked about in the scripture. If we said everyone must do that, I can tell you that I know that there are several of you here that are diabetic.
That would be malpractice.
Lots of churches do it. Some churches tell you to handle snakes because if you're really loved by God, you won't get bit and if you do get bit, you won't die.
Spiritual malpractice, we see it everywhere. We live under the yoke and the burden of that malpractice. For some of us, fasting from food is a great way of saying, hmm, I'm finding comfort in food when I should be finding comfort in love and acceptance.
It can be a great way to understand who we are a little bit better and to allow that love to permeate us a little deeper, little deeper. But for some of us, it could actually kill us.
We have to understand who we are and who God is calling us to be around that great love.
So I'm going to give us a little practice today.
But I do want to give you just a second before we move into our prayer.
If you have check boxes to check. If you're asking for this list to know you're right. I just want you to breathe in.
You are made by God.
You are lovely and beautiful and have all the ingredients already there.
You are enough.
You do not need to do anything. You do not need to be on your knees in front of your bed begging for Acceptance.
So now to the point of my sermon, which was how to pray the Psalms.
If you're looking for a way to pray and you don't always have the words, going to the Psalms in Scripture can be a great way of finding words that are helpful to you.
So we are going to do something called lectio divina. We've done it before here. And I've chosen Psalm, a little snippet from Psalm 1:118 because it is in honor of it being Palm Sunday today. If I had my druthers, I would have all picked you palms and we would have marched around the church. But Jason says we're not that kind of church.
So we're going to actually pray these words three times. And you can just pray them. I will read them. You're going to be able to pray them in your heart.
And if you. Hopefully you all got a bulletin and a pen.
And on the bulletin is this prayer, this Psalm.
And we are going to lectio read it and then we are going to reflect on it.
So you're going to read and then you're going to look at. Is there a word, is there a phrase that stands out to me in this?
If you have a pen, you can underline it or circle it. What's sticking out to you?
And then when you reflect, you're going to say, why is this speaking to me? Does it make me mad?
Does it make me excited to what's happening? Do I resonate with it in some way in my own life?
And then I'm going to give you a second to respond. God, I'm feeling this way.
Bring light to my understanding.
And then I'm going to give you a second to rest.
Hmm.
Just rest. And then we're going to read it again.
Does the same word or phrase still stick out to you? Does it have a different meaning? Is there something deeper there?
If you underline the first time and there's something different, circle it, vice versa. If you circled, then underline, we're going to go through it again, then we're going to go through it a third time, reflecting in prayer on the Psalms or on scripture or any kind of sacred text or poetry.
We can't just read it once and move on.
This isn't an Instagram reel.
Don't scroll through it quickly.
Let it sink in.
Interrogate it a little bit and then we will finish up. Are you all ready? Do you have your bulletins? If you don't, it's going to be on the screen.
Okay. If you Feel comfortable. You can kind of bow your heads.
I like to say, start to yoke your heart with the divine.
But maybe it's just for you breathing in deeply.
And I'll read while you look at your paper and consider your phrase.
The Lord is God.
God has been good to us.
Take branches in your hands.
Join in the march. On the day of the feast.
March up to the corners of the altar.
You are my God and I will praise you.
You are my God and I will honor you.
Give thanks to the Lord because he is good.
He is faithful. His faithful love endures forever.
Underline a phrase or a word.
Why is that phrase or word speaking to you?
If you're so inclined, share that with the divine.
Now take a deep breath in and let your body feel rest.
Okay, let's do it again.
The Lord is God.
God has been good to us.
Take branches in your hands.
Join in the march. On the day of the feast, march up to the corners of the altar.
You are my God and I will praise you.
You are my God and I will honor you.
Give thanks to the Lord because he is good.
His faithful love continues forever.
Is there a different word or phrase that's sticking out to you or is it the same one?
Why is it speaking to you? What does it reveal?
If you're so inclined, lift that up.
Now take a deep breath in.
We'll do a final reading.
The Lord is God.
God has been good to us.
Take branches in hand.
Join in the march. On the day of the feast.
March up to the corners of the altar.
You are my God and I will praise you. You are my God and I will honor you.
Give thanks to the Lord because he is good. His faithful love continues forever.
Before I have the band come up, let me just say the wide open wilderness of freedom isn't always easy.
And sometimes we do need a form, a plan, some of us more than others.
But planning that allows for hope and love that's unconditional.
A practice that allows love to permeate through your entire being and flow out through your being to others.
There is no law. There are no rules.
You can do that practice while you're making dinner.
There is no special magical list.
What is magical is moving away from performative ways of living and moving into the knowledge that you are greatly loved.
I'm going to let the band come up while I say just a final prayer.
God, thank you that it is for freedom that you have set us free. Thank you that your gospel is a trajectory of setting more and more people into liberation.
Help us, God, to not only live in that liberation in our own personal spiritual practice, but help us to also work towards the justice of others for liberation so that all can walk in the freedom of this world, of the love and the beauty of being made in your image.
In Jesus name we pray.
Amen.
[00:35:43] 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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