[00:00:00] Foreign welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
[00:00:14] This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church.
[00:00:18] 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.
[00:00:31] So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:42] Hey, good morning.
[00:00:45] Some of y' all just keep coming back.
[00:00:49] It's another Sunday. Here you are again.
[00:00:53] In spite of the insane, crazy things that I said the last time you were here, apparently you've decided to return.
[00:01:00] Or maybe you thought maybe Janelle's teaching this week and then you're like, ah, it's Jason God guy.
[00:01:07] Well, we are in the midst of a kind of very short miniature teaching series that we're calling OSC's DNA. So we're talking a little bit in these last few weeks before the end of June, before we do have our congregational meeting, which happens next week on the 29th after church.
[00:01:29] As we approach the end of the season, it seemed like a good time for us to talk about, like, what is it that makes us who we are? What's the essence of the Oceanside Sanctuary? You can't swing a dead cat in America without hitting a church, right? So why in the world do we exist?
[00:01:46] Why do we need to be here on the corner of Freeman and Topeka? Which by the way, we've been here on the corner of Freeman and Topeka since 1928 and this is the new building, right? So what is it that makes us distinctive enough that this church has been around for 150 years and what's carrying us forward? And many of you know that we're right in the midst of reworking our sort of long term mission and vision right now. Many of you have been participating in the surveys that we've been doing and the creative sort of input sessions that we've been having to sort of plan the next five years of our, our existence.
[00:02:22] So we thought be a good opportunity to sort of revisit the essential commitments that make our church our church. I want to show you a couple of slides again. I know I don't usually do slides. I did slides last week. We're going to do slides again today and then next week we'll have more of the same slides because this I think is helpful.
[00:02:44] But before we get into that, I want to share with you the passage that I'm reading from today. It's John, chapter six, verses one through 14.
[00:02:53] And I'd like to read it and then invite you just to pray with me as usual before we get started. John, chapter 6, verses 1 through 14, says this.
[00:03:03] After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias.
[00:03:10] A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.
[00:03:17] Jesus went up on the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now, the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. By the way, you can tell John, or the author of this gospel is not writing for a Jewish audience because he explains what Passover is, right? So John's Gospel is very much a gospel written for non Jewish folks, Gentiles in sort of the southern, like Asia Minor region, what we would call Asia Minor today.
[00:03:43] So they're not familiar with these kinds of events.
[00:03:47] So he says. Now, the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. And when he looked up, he being Jesus, looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him. Jesus said to Philip, where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?
[00:04:01] And he said this to test him, for He Himself knew what he was going to do.
[00:04:06] And Philip answered him. Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to eat even a little.
[00:04:13] One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, there's a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.
[00:04:21] But what are they among so many people?
[00:04:26] Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now, there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they all sat down, about 5,000 in all. And then Jesus took the loaves. And when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.
[00:04:41] So also the fish as much as they wanted. And when they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be lost.
[00:04:52] So they gathered them up. And from the fragments of the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten, they filled 12 baskets.
[00:05:00] And when people saw the sign that had been done, they began to say, this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.
[00:05:09] Would you just pray with me briefly?
[00:05:12] God, we thank youk for today. We thank youk again for this opportunity for us to gather together for this time and in this space this morning. We ask that yout would meet us in some way today. That however, it is that we express our faith just as we sang a moment ago.
[00:05:35] However, it is that you have liberated us to be spiritual people.
[00:05:41] We ask that you would meet us in that way today, each of us, that there would be a Sense that when we come here, when we greet each other, when we encourage each other, when we confess and share with each other, when we hear these words from scripture, that we would be not just challenged and stretched, but encountered in some way by you.
[00:06:08] That's our prayer this morning. That you would encounter us and that we'd be different.
[00:06:15] We pray that in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:06:18] Okay, so you've heard this before, but my favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving. All year long is marked by either, like, pre or post Thanksgiving. We're either, like, recovering from Thanksgiving, or we're, like, preparing for Thanksgiving.
[00:06:34] We love Thanksgiving in our house, at the Coker House. We make a big deal out of it every single year. I know it's a problematic holiday. I don't like that either. But I can't quit it. I can't give it up, right?
[00:06:47] So we just embrace it.
[00:06:50] And I think I love Thanksgiving partly because as a kid, like, the idea that there was so much food everywhere was like, magic, right?
[00:07:00] Like in our house. For me growing up, I grew up in San Bernardino, California. If you don't know where that is, be grateful. But I grew up in San Bernardino, California. Not the wealthiest of towns. We were not the wealthiest of families.
[00:07:15] Food was not necessarily plentiful in my house growing up all time. But at Thanksgiving, there was a magical abundance of food.
[00:07:24] And at Thanksgiving, not only was the day itself an amazing feast, an amazing opportunity to, like, gorge and indulge, like, beyond the bounds of morality, right? There are starving people somewhere, and we are eating all this food.
[00:07:39] But the best part was that that food would last for days.
[00:07:45] Was it like this in your house? Like, there are entire industries devoted to the storage of food that has been cooked in, like, the days prior to it, right? So there are containers in our refrigerator growing up. And every day after Thanksgiving for so many days, I would go to the fridge in eager anticipation of the turkey and the gravy and the stuffing and the mashed potatoes that was in there. And I would stick all of that stuff between two slices of bread and have sandwiches. And, you know, my mother and grandmother would stick all of that stuff inside of, like, a pie crust and make, like, you know, pot pie out of it. And then we'd throw it into soups, and then we would, like, just snack on it throughout the day. And then, you know, after a while, because we didn't believe in expiration dates, it would be turkey jerky after a while, right? Like, it just never stopped. It was like. It was like magic and, like, call Me crazy, but I think, like, food is better the next day and the next day after that, right? Like, it gives, like, time for seasoning, right? Like, if we buy food from the store, Janelle and I can't eat it past the expiration date, but somehow, if we make our own food that lasts for weeks, is it like that for you?
[00:09:00] So I share that because I'm calling my message today the Leftovers.
[00:09:07] It's a great show, but that's not what this is about for those of you who watch hbo. So I'm calling it the Leftovers, because I think leftovers get a bad rap.
[00:09:16] I think leftovers are amazing.
[00:09:18] Sometimes when we talk about leftovers, we speak of it in a pejorative way, like, oh, you just got the leftovers, the dregs. But actually, the leftovers are where the magic is, in my opinion.
[00:09:29] This is a story. I don't know if you caught it. This is a story about leftovers.
[00:09:35] A little boy brought five loaves and two fishes, and somehow, magically, that lasted for. For a long period of time. It fed 5,000 people. And at the end of that, they went around and gathered what was left over, and what was left over filled 12 baskets full. The leftovers in this story are not a negative thing.
[00:09:59] There's something magic, I think, happening in here that I want to get to today. But before I get to it, I want to acknowledge that there are problems with stories like this.
[00:10:11] And I think the problem is that when we come to scripture and we read about miracles like this, it speaks to something in us that maybe isn't representative of our best selves.
[00:10:25] Sometimes we read passages like this and we think, I want to be able to multiply food. I want to be able to heal sick people. I want to be able to walk on water. I want to be able to do the miracles that Jesus did. And sometimes entire churches and entire church traditions are built around the intoxicating pursuit of this kind of power.
[00:10:52] And if you don't know what that's like, if you don't know what it's like to be in the kind of church that pursues that sort of miraculous power all the time, then God bless you.
[00:11:05] Because Janelle and I spent the better part of our early adulthood in churches like that, in churches that read these kinds of passages and believed, well, this must mean that to be a real Christian, to be a person with real faith, a person with enough faith that we ought to be able to call upon God and, like, rain fire from heaven on our enemies and multiply Food for the sick or pray for those who have critical illnesses and see them recover.
[00:11:38] And I'm not saying that inexplicable miracles don't happen. I have experienced some of that.
[00:11:48] But the dark side of that is this kind of pursuit of power.
[00:11:56] And I really do think that that is the caution, because I don't know if you've noticed, but life can be scary.
[00:12:07] Life is insecure.
[00:12:10] Many of us do grow up in circumstances where we don't know where our next meal is coming from.
[00:12:18] Many of us did grow up in situations or live now in circumstances where our bodies are failing us.
[00:12:26] And that is terrifying. Many of us live in situations or exist within families or work within workplaces or participate in communities that are deeply hurtful and toxic and unhealthy. And we want to be saved from those situations. And when we experience that kind of fear of life, the temptation is for us to be powerful, to be able to control all the circumstances of life that we so frustratingly can't control.
[00:13:02] And I think much of Christian history is this story. Much of Christian history is the story of people who saw miracles like this in Scripture and thought, oh, this is an opportunity. This faith, this life of spirituality is an opportunity for us to finally gain the power and control over others and our communities and our circumstances that we have been longing for, because Jesus seems to embody that.
[00:13:32] I don't think that's what this story is about.
[00:13:37] I think this is giving away the ending a little bit. But I think that genuine, healthy, authentic spiritual experiences stabilize us.
[00:13:50] They help us to grow and become healthier people.
[00:13:55] And I think unhealthy, inauthentic spiritual experiences tend to destabilize us.
[00:14:04] They tend to neuroticize us.
[00:14:09] And one way I think that you can tell if a person or a group is engaging in healthy spirituality is that they are becoming healthier.
[00:14:20] And if they're engaging in an unhealthy spirituality, they're becoming less healthy.
[00:14:27] And I realize that that's sort of subjective and problematic, so I'm just going to gloss right over that, and we're going to go to the slides. Are you ready?
[00:14:35] Last week I said to you that this is our DNA, that we are inclusive, inspiring, and impactful. We talk about this all the time. You go to the website, you're going to see it plastered all over the website. We pepper it into, you know, all of our little speeches that we make. We say we're an inclusive church and inspiring church and an impactful church. And last week I said to you the first characteristic of our DNA is that we're inclusive. And I shared with you that I think inclusivity just makes sense when you understand the gospel. Today I want to talk to you a little bit about what it means to be an inspiring church, because that's a bit of an unusual word. And I want to explain what we mean by inspiring. Inspiring as a word literally means to be filled with or occupied by the spirits.
[00:15:22] And so when we say that we hope to be an inspiring church, what we're saying is that we hope that you and I and all of us together would be genuinely filled and occupied by the spirit.
[00:15:39] And that is wacky language.
[00:15:43] This is why we call it inspiring, because it's a little less wacky. Right.
[00:15:48] Like artists talk about being inspired, and what they generally mean by that is that they experience a spark of creativity. As a pastor, as a theologian, I want to say that's the spirit of God. When Joey writes an amazing song and we get to sing it together and we encounter something other than ourselves that is inspired by which, I mean, we have met God, whether we're comfortable with that language or not, whether we know it or not, I think that's what's happening.
[00:16:18] And I told you last week we could go to the next slide last week that this was based on this kind of construct. I sort of shared with you that behind the scenes, Janelle and I talk a lot about.
[00:16:29] One of my favorite theologians was Dorothy Zola.
[00:16:34] She's a German Lutheran theologian and shared with you that picture last week of her smoking a cigarette, which makes her my hero, because that's just punk anyway.
[00:16:43] But I also like what she had to say.
[00:16:47] And she used this construct. She said she borrowed this from a Catholic theologian named Friedrich von Hugo. Not that you care, but, you know, there you go. There it is. See, there's my little citation there at the bottom right.
[00:17:00] She said that a living church. Her and von Hugo both said that a living church is a church that contains all three of these elements. It's thoughtful, it's spiritual, and it's organized. Last week I said to you, thoughtful, by which we derive. From which we derive inclusive means that it's a church of people who use their brains.
[00:17:19] We don't check our brains at the door. We think that we were given our analytical intellectual capacities for a reason, that those things are good, that God and spirit are not opposed to those things at all. In fact, that's part of what it means to be human, and we think that's good. So we strive to be A thoughtful church here.
[00:17:37] But she also said that a living church is a church that is spiritual.
[00:17:43] Actually, that's not what she said. What she said was mystical, but that is wacky language. So I've changed it to spiritual.
[00:17:52] But what she meant was mystical. What she meant was contemplative. What she meant was that. That on some level we are encountering something beyond ourselves.
[00:18:08] And it might not surprise you to know that I think that's what this story in John chapter six is about.
[00:18:17] So I'm going to ask Mary to take the slide off the screen so it's not a distraction. I want to revisit this story with you briefly.
[00:18:26] If this story is not about the miracle, if this story is not another opportunity to say, for example, apologetically prove that Jesus was the Messiah because he could do crazy, amazing things like multiply bread. If that's not what this story is about, and if the story isn't about inspiring those of us who are Christians to somehow be able to do miracles. I don't know when's the last time you tried to multiply loaves and fishes, but I have tried it. It didn't work.
[00:18:57] It just doesn't work.
[00:18:59] It doesn't matter how hard you try to believe. It doesn't matter what version of the Bible you read. It doesn't matter what tradition of religion you're a part of. You cannot control the loaves and the fishes around you.
[00:19:13] So if that's not what this story means, what does it mean?
[00:19:18] Well, I want to suggest to you that the real meaning of this story is found in these three elements.
[00:19:26] And those are, number one, that people are hungry.
[00:19:32] That there is an essential lack, an essential emptiness in this story, that 5,000 people are sitting around.
[00:19:42] And they're sitting around because they're there to encounter some sense of spirit, some sense of the presence of God. But their hungry, they're empty. They are longing to be filled.
[00:19:57] The first element of this story is that there is emptiness in it.
[00:20:01] The second element is that a boy comes along and offers what he has.
[00:20:09] What does he have is three loaves and two fishes, which is not nearly enough to feed 5,000 people.
[00:20:16] But he offers what he has.
[00:20:21] He and the disciple who recognize this don't say, hey, I'm sorry, it's not enough.
[00:20:27] He doesn't say, ah, this is totally inadequate. There's no point in me offering it. He simply offers what he has.
[00:20:35] So if the first important element of this story is that there is a lack, an emptiness, the second important part of this story is that there is a gift, something to be offered.
[00:20:49] And the third important element of this story is that the gift that is offered is multiplied.
[00:21:00] The gift is magnified, it's multiplied. It is miraculously and mysteriously turned into, from not enough into more than enough.
[00:21:14] This, I want to suggest to you, is a story about the mystery of life.
[00:21:23] This, I think, is what it means to exist in a world of scarcity and lack and fear and insecurity. What it means is that we experience a world where there is a need and we don't have enough to meet that need, but we have something.
[00:21:48] You have something.
[00:21:52] And it is the experience of life, in my opinion, that when you offer what you have in the face of that emptiness, that the unbelievable, appalling, insane mystery of life is that it is often multiplied, that you have nothing to do with its multiplication, with the miracle of it becoming enough, other than to just offer it, to give it.
[00:22:29] This is not a story about how you and I can perform literal miracles in the world. It is not a story about Jesus having enough magic tricks to prove that he is the Son of God. This is a story that illustrates, that demonstrates how faith works.
[00:22:51] We see this mystery, by the way, throughout Scripture. This is not the only story. In Exodus, chapter 16, we see the story of the Israelites. They are leaving Egypt. They leave behind their bondage, their slavery. They enter into the desert and they're hungry.
[00:23:09] They have two lacks, two, emptiness. The desert is a symbol of emptiness and lack. And in the midst of the desert, they don't have enough to eat.
[00:23:21] So God delivers a divine object lesson. He rains manna from heaven.
[00:23:29] In this story, God gives the gift, and then God instructs them, I want you to take this gift. I want you to go out, I want you to gather it, and I want you to only gather that which you need so that there is enough for everybody. Later on, Paul in 1st Corinthians and 2nd Corinthians, he comments on this story and he says, what happens here is that the gift is multiplied to be enough for everybody, because everybody is faithful to take only what they need.
[00:23:56] So there is a lack, there is a gift, and there is a multiplication to make sure that everybody has what they need.
[00:24:04] Second Kings, chapter four and five. There is this amazing story of Elijah, the prophet Elijah, who hears from a local widow that she is deeply in debt.
[00:24:17] And so the. The debt collector comes around and says, if you can't pay the debt, I'm going to conscript both of your sons, her only two sons. I'm going to conscript them into the army. And they're going to have to go off and fight in order to earn your family out of debt. So terrified, distraught, afraid that she's going to lose her two sons in her moment of great need, she reaches out to the prophet Elijah.
[00:24:45] There's lack.
[00:24:48] She's in debt.
[00:24:50] She can't provide for herself.
[00:24:54] He says to her, I want you to take what little you have, a little bit of oil and a little bit of flour, and I want you to take that oil and gather all the empty vessels in your house. Right there's the emptiness again.
[00:25:10] I want you to pour the oil into those empty vessels and miraculously, the oil is multiplied.
[00:25:18] She fills every empty vessel in the house and has more oil than she knows what to do with. And because of that, she's able to make bread and sell the bread and get herself out of debt. And the story has all three elements.
[00:25:31] Emptiness or lack, the gift. And the gift is multiplied to be enough for her.
[00:25:39] John, chapter 2, verses 1 through 11. Jesus turns the water into wine. This isn't just because Jesus likes to party. Although Jesus likes to party, it means something that his first miracle was to turn water into wine. But similar story, they run out of wine.
[00:26:00] They have a Jewish wedding feast which famously lasts two weeks, and they run out of wine. Jesus says, gather all of your containers of water.
[00:26:10] If what you want is wine and all you have is water, that is as empty and lacking as it gets.
[00:26:19] Jesus turns the water into wine. The gift is given, it multiplies. Everybody has enough wine. In fact, according to the story, it's the best stuff.
[00:26:29] This is the story that we see running throughout Scripture about what it means to be a person of faith, what faith itself actually means, and what spirituality is.
[00:26:41] This is, I would suggest to you, what Old Testament worship is all about.
[00:26:49] We discover that we live in a world that is difficult and, and insecure and fearful. And God invites the Old Testament worshipers to bring their offering their sacrifice, recognizing that God by God's grace can magnify that, multiply that to meet their needs, Jesus offers his own body, his own life, and that is multiplied by the Spirit of God. In Acts, chapter two, the Spirit comes down on all people because Jesus offers himself as a gift.
[00:27:28] This is what this story is telling us, that living a life of spirituality is living a life where we bring what we have, knowing that if we let go of control of what we have, the that God can mysteriously multiply it.
[00:27:51] And this is, I think, the irony of faith, the irony of Genuine spirituality is that by our fear, we are seeking to be in control.
[00:28:05] But faith is about letting go of control by our fear. We're constantly trying to control and manipulate and coerce and secure our circumstances.
[00:28:17] We're constantly trying to jockey for position and put all the people in their right places so that we can secure what we need.
[00:28:26] But faith is about letting go and trusting that the mystery of life is that if we let go of control and just offer what we have to meet other people's needs, that there will be enough for everyone.
[00:28:47] And that is a terrifying prospect, I think, because it asks us to trust something, someone, some thing beyond us that we don't get to bark orders at.
[00:29:05] It asks us to trust that this is, despite all of our observations, that this is how life actually works.
[00:29:19] Jesus says it this way. He says, unless I tell you that, I tell you the truth, unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, no life can come from it.
[00:29:32] What that saying means is that there is a mystery at the heart of life and we are not in control of it.
[00:29:43] We can plant the seed, we can water the seed, we can make sure that it gets sunlight, but we can't make it grow.
[00:29:53] All of this is important, by the way, because if I can get that last slide back up there again, please.
[00:30:01] What I want to share with you today is that being inspired. When we say that we are a church that seeks to be inspired, what this means is that we are a church that is spiritual.
[00:30:15] We're a church that's spiritual.
[00:30:19] What it means to say that we're a church that's spiritual. It does not mean that we aren't thoughtful. It doesn't mean that we aren't intellectual. It doesn't mean that we don't strive to use our brains. What it means is that we admit that no matter how hard we use our brains, no matter how smart or educated we might be, no matter how much we try to analyze Christianity to death, that there is no life of faith without letting go of control, that at some point we have to let go, that we have to trust that if we bring what we have and we give it not for our own benefit, but for the good of others who have needs, that the mystery of life will enter in and multiply it and make it more, make it enough, enough not just for me, but for you, for all of us.
[00:31:17] This is why Dorothy Zola said that a church that isn't spiritual is a dead church.
[00:31:28] If we don't have some sense that there is a mystery to life, then we are stuck with a kind of dry and dead analytical understanding of our faith. Last week I made the joke that, you know, some churches are referred to as intelligence on ice, and others are referred to as ignorance on fire. That is, that sort of interplay between being thoughtful and being spiritual. We want to be intelligence on fire.
[00:32:03] We want to be a church that is smart and thoughtful and considerate and careful, but also aware that life is a mystery that we can't control. And that there is the experience of something beyond us that we trust, that we believe, because by our experience, it keeps multiplying our meager gifts.
[00:32:28] My guess is that you've experienced that.
[00:32:31] My guess is that if we took the time today, if we weren't all really hungry and needed to go, if we took the time that every one of you would have a story of spirit, a story where something happened, where something was multiplied, where something was magnified beyond your ability to control it. And it became so much more than you ever thought it would be.
[00:32:58] And you realized, in retrospect, thank God I didn't get what I said I wanted, because what I have now is so much better.
[00:33:06] Thank God I let go of trying to be in charge of that thing.
[00:33:15] There's a reason that so many of these stories, from John 6 to Exodus chapter 16 to 1st Kings, 1st Kings 5 and 6, all of these. There's a reason why so many of these stories involve either food or fire.
[00:33:30] It's because spirit, the encounter with the spirit of God, sustains us and sets us on fire.
[00:33:40] And without that, we're dead.
[00:33:44] We're dead.
[00:33:48] The key, I think, is not to abandon spirit, which so many of us have done, because our experience with it has either been abusive or unreliable.
[00:34:01] I think the key is for us to liberate our encounter with the spirit.
[00:34:08] We already sang at least two songs today about this.
[00:34:13] The key is for us to stop trying to control each other's experience with the spirit of God.
[00:34:21] Some people. Maybe you've noticed this. Some people experience this mystery, this encounter with a sense of something other that exists beside you. Some people experience this in a very affective way, like they encounter some sense of a mystery and they are overcome physically. They experience strong emotions, and those things translate into a sense of intimacy with this spirit. And then they speak about God in very intimate ways. And I wish they wouldn't, because I'm uncomfortable with that.
[00:34:57] My ancestry is English.
[00:35:00] We're very uptight.
[00:35:02] I mean, we're not Germans, but we're fairly uptight.
[00:35:10] But this is how some people Experience God. A genuine sense of affective, emotional encounter that makes them feel very close to that mystery, gives them the sense that they really know who God is.
[00:35:26] Other people experience it in a very abstract way, in a very analytical way.
[00:35:34] That's okay.
[00:35:37] Some people experience this mystery in a very interpersonal way, in a very relational way.
[00:35:43] Jesus said something very close to this when he said, where? Wherever two or more of you are gathered, I am there.
[00:35:50] And I know that for some of you. And I know some of you are this way. When you are with other human beings of good faith and goodwill, you're like, there's God, there's God.
[00:36:07] But listen, some of you, some of you don't experience God in an affective way or an abstract way or an interpersonal way. Some of you experience God as a kind of revelation, like a light bulb moment, like a flash of creativity, like something has come to you from beyond yourself. And it isn't AI because you're not, you know, chatting with GPT, right? It's the encounter of something new and fresh and completely unexplainable. And that feels like God to you.
[00:36:42] The religious word for that is revelation.
[00:36:46] Some of you experience God like revelation.
[00:36:50] It might be few and far between, but you hold on to those experiences, right? Like a golfer that shot well one time and now you always think you're going to do well.
[00:37:02] Some of you experience God as absence.
[00:37:11] Some of you experience God as absence, as the personification of that lack of that we talked about in the story as a great big empty darkness that for some inexplicable reason, feels comforting.
[00:37:43] There's a fancy theological term for that. It's Deus absconditis, which means the God who hides God self.
[00:37:54] Mother Teresa is famous since her death for being somebody who never experienced a sense of the presence of God in the later years of her life and interpreted that to be God's presence in her life in a way that was growing her and stretching her in new ways.
[00:38:17] Hey, listen. The problem is not how you experience God. The problem is that you judge the way other people experience God.
[00:38:27] There are more ways to experience the divine mystery of life than there are people alive at this very moment.
[00:38:36] There is room for all of it.
[00:38:39] There is room for us to learn from each other's way of experiencing God in this way.
[00:38:48] But there is no living church without the experience of mystery, without the experience of that in our lives. Amen.
[00:39:04] 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
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
