[00:00:08] Speaker A: 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.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: I'm happy to be here this morning with you all. And we are actually going to be continuing a series that we have been doing called setting collective tables. And this Sunday teaching series, it kind of coincides with our new to us podcast, the collective table, which comes out every other Monday, and it rotates between a combination of Jason and Janelle and myself, and we talk about a number of topics. But this fall, we have been talking a lot about what it means to exist in a world with a variety of opinions, a variety of people with differing priorities and convictions.
We explore how fear and doubt can play a role in this, and we have especially been looking at what it means to cultivate a sense of curiosity and all the noise that often tries to convince us that it is better to shut out others who are not like us. Right. I'm sure you guys can relate in some sense to that. So last week, Jason spoke about the fragmentations and I, differences that we find within ourselves, not just outside of ourselves, what it would look like to grapple with that and the importance of finding beauty around us. Because sometimes it seems like everywhere we look, kind of how Leann reflected, there's just hopelessness everywhere we look. Right. And so this morning, I want to kind of stay in that area of looking at fragmentation within ourselves, kind of a part two, if you will, as we focus on identity, what it means to tease out that inner voice of wisdom, and how that could help us to connect with God. So before we begin this morning, would you guys pray with me?
God of us all, God of many names?
We come before you this morning from various places, both physically or maybe even various places within ourselves.
Would you come alongside of us as we set this time aside to discover what you have to show us?
It's in your name that we pray.
Amen.
So I have a question that I want you to think about. When was the last time that you had a conversation with someone and they asked you, what do you do?
That's a very pretty common small talk question when getting to know someone. Although the best advice that I have ever gotten is not to ask someone what they do as to allude to their job, but to ask questions that get at what that person loves. But that's hard sometimes. So I still often find myself in these career centered conversations. And it's in these moments that I really envy accountants. I don't know if anybody here is an accountant or something like that or just works an office job, but nobody seems to ask you guys questions. Maybe they ask you tax advice, but there's something about just having a straightforward answer that I kind of wish I could have. Because don't get me wrong, I really love being a pastor. It is one of my greatest joys that I get to do this job for a living.
But sometimes when I get in those conversations and people say, what do you do? And I say, I'm a pastor. Sometimes it's followed up by the craziest answers. Sometimes people go, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry I cursed in front of you earlier.
Or the best question I got one time somebody asked me, well, how are you married?
That one takes a little bit to get.
Sometimes the mood shifts, as if the person all of a sudden feels like they can't be themselves around me. And of course, this makes me sad, but I have a lot of empathy when this happens because I recognize that the title pastor, minister, reverend, it carries a lot of connotations. So it's totally fair for people to be at least a little suspicious. I know sometimes when I meet people who are pastors, I'm also a little suspicious as well. And I am one.
I'm also kind of reminded of when you are a kid and you think that your teacher lives at school, did anybody think that? Or does anybody's kids think their teacher lives at school? And then one day you see them in the grocery store and you're like, oh, my gosh, my teacher is buying apples. Me and my mom buy apples every week. My teacher must be a human.
It's really easy to see people as one dimensional. It's easy to label someone based on a role or a title when the truth is that we all contain multitudes. And I have a really great picture that I'd like to share that I think demonstrates this best. It's one of my favorites. I need to get it framed.
To be human means to be so many different things. Even a nun who smokes cigarettes sometimes.
Sometimes like none smoking cigarettes, all these things within us can seemingly conflict. For example, I'm a pastor, and I'm also a woman.
I'm a military spouse, and I hold progressive values. I'm really organized. If you know me, I'm kind of a clean freak. But I'm also really creative, and if you've ever ridden in my car before, my car is a little bit messy, and I like it that way.
So what are those things for you?
What elements and identities come together in yourself to make up who you are?
Sometimes these things perfectly mesh together, but sometimes they're harder to hold together.
Sometimes people don't always understand them, but you wouldn't be you, in a sense, without all of them.
And I also want to provide a disclaimer because I have provided some really lighthearted examples this morning. But sometimes some of our identities, we don't get to choose, or they're placed upon us inherently. We're born with them. We don't choose them. I'm thinking things like race, ethnicity, sexuality, or even our socioeconomic situations.
Sometimes our identities are temporary. We only have them for a time.
Sometimes we carry certain identities with us for life.
And the funny thing is, you are always you throughout these different identities and changes. And it seems to be the different ways we identify and understand ourselves that evolve and change. These are the things that evolve and change throughout our life because we're constantly negotiating the things around us, the people, communities, the powers that be, the many things that inform everything we do.
And a part of the human experience is parsing out now. Where do I fit in all of this? Who am I in all of this? How do I define myself in relation to this?
The many identities that help us answer the question, who am I? This can be a good thing. I think the LGBTQ community is a wonderful example of this. Regardless of labels, queer people have always existed, and they will all exist. But in recent history in the west, we've seen an increase in inclusion and acceptance, even though there's a ways to go. And one of the results of this is the many letters that make up the LGBTQIA acronym that shows us that there are so many ways to express gender and identity, and people have all given names to it.
And the great thing about this is the community that people have found in these shared and named experiences. So a kid who isn't sure how they're feeling hears someone speak about their named experience, and they can say, I see myself in that I'm not alone.
And in this way, identity is a beautiful and healing tool.
But sometimes identity, in the way that we define ourselves, it can go awry, right?
Sometimes we forget who we are, and I think we are at most risk of this when we stop listening to our own voice, when the way we define ourselves more often begins outside of us. Rather than from within that wisdom of our own being.
And ironically enough, an example of this can be found in the ways that dominant expressions of Christianity, especially here in the US, often defines trusting in God.
And like I said, ironically, that is actually where we are going to find ourselves grappling with scripture today. So let's take a look at proverbs three one, eight. I'm going to read it out for us.
It says, my child, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments for length of days and years of life are abundant and abundant welfare they will give you. Do not let loyalty and faithfulness forsake you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart.
Then you will find favor and high regard in the sight of God and people.
Trust in the Lord with all of your heart. Do not rely on your own insight in all your ways. Acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.
Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight. That was definitely a memory verse for me as a kid. I don't know about you if you grew up in church and this is a verse to struggle with because the immediately clear interpretation means that we have to abandon ourselves and trust God.
Like I said, that's a very popular understanding and interpretation. But what has that led to?
There's an entire industry of religious trauma therapists who are spending their careers researching the effects of this very idea and working to help people heal from this idea in their lives because it has been the root of so much harm.
Harm is a result of a deep disconnection from the self of deep self abandonment. Mistrust in yourself, a suspicion of your own inner voice holding it back, maybe being afraid to mess up or make mistakes, being unsure of who you are, void of identity, entirely beholden to others expectations and definitions of you.
That's not a way for anyone to live. So why am I still reading this? Why take any advice from this ancient book of wisdom?
We read from Proverbs and Proverbs is one of those books that you see on Pinterest or Instagram a lot like the cute little quotes. It has really great quote polls. I don't know if anybody here is a victim of clickbait or knows what clickbait is. If you're online and you see a really intriguing title or article or video and you're like oh, I have to see what that is. But it's never what you think. They never actually get to the thing that drew you in in the first place.
Proverbs kind of reminds me a little bit like that. At first, it can seem like really simple phrases or quick fixes, but we have to look at it as so much more.
It is a book of wisdom. It's written like if a parent were speaking to a child, offering guidance. It's full of these bite sized nuggets of truth that, when unpacked, hold a deeper meaning.
Sometimes I imagine proverbs as those things that your parents say to you over and over as a kid, and then you become an adult and you hear yourself saying theme. Maybe if you have kids, you hear yourself saying them back to your kids and they take a whole new meaning in your life as you grow and change.
Proverbs is this ancient book of wisdom. They're words to turn over in our minds and chew on a bit before we reach a conclusion about what they might mean for us, which makes them really great to meditate on.
For me, something that is helpful when reading proverbs specifically is remembering a certain metaphor that runs through the book.
When the poet talks about wisdom. Wisdom is most often personified as a woman.
Proverbs eight, which we can put up on the screen for you guys to see. It tells us that lady wisdom herself calls out in the streets.
And later in proverbs eight, it says that even this is even more intriguing to me, that she was somehow present at the dawn of creation, standing with God.
So when we're reading these words, it's not just quippy advice that works great on your Pinterest board or as an Instagram caption. It's this feminine alternative type of divine wisdom.
And the feminine is often associated with bodily or the internal. So I wonder then, what it would look like for us to look back on proverbs three with this type of metaphor in mind.
And like we noticed at first, it seems like it's telling us to abandon our reasoning, our translation. Today it just says, trust in the Lord. Don't rely on your own insight, as if faith means just checking your brain at the door.
But I'm going to press and have us wonder, what if that is not quite it? What if it's not an anti intellectual statement?
What if it's more warning us against things like arrogance or even hyper independence?
What if this piece of wisdom is nudging us away from the kind of thinking that assumes that we're better or more righteous or need to be all of these things in order to get approval from others?
What if it doesn't mean that trusting God means we have to make a good or right decision?
And I want us to wonder instead, what if it is inviting us to connect with something divine within ourselves?
You know, we can't leave out the poet's words here in verse three that says that these teachings, these wisdom, or this wisdom, it's to be bound around our necks and written on the tablet of our hearts. Trust here is not beholden to the external source of expectations and control. But trust is more about being deeply connected to having an ear to the ground of our own complex inner workings.
What if this ancient wisdom tells us that our inner wisdom is something were invited to trust and listen to a voice that reflects God's wisdom, calling us to live in alignment with our true selves and all of the identities that we hold?
So this passage, I would argue, encourages us not to abandon ourselves, but to trust that our inner wisdom is a way of drawing closer to God, a way of trusting God more.
Verse eight even tells us that this kind of trust will be healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body.
There's an embodied outcome to trusting both God and ourselves. These things can be held together. Bringing these together can offer us a deep sense of wholeness and well being. It can be the antidote to the ills that come out of self abandonment. When we finally stop that endless struggle for control and allow ourselves to trust that divine voice within, that can be a pathway to healing.
So what does it mean then, to trust ourselves when we live in a world of such competing identities and fragmentation, not just outside of ourselves, but also within ourselves?
How do we discern between everything that influences who we are? How do we even begin to know? What is our inner wisdom to trust?
I can't promise a straightforward answer here for you this morning. I don't want to ruin things, but I have a couple of ideas of ways to get started.
In christian theology, we have something we talk about God as three in one, the Trinity. Maybe you've heard people say, Father, son, Holy Spirit. The fancy word for this is trinitarian theology. But I say all of this to offer a helpful paradigm for thinking about what it means to parse out the wisdom among the many pieces of ourselves. The mystery of the Trinity, God is Father, Son, holy Spirit teaches us how to hold unity and diversity together.
This tension between unity and multiplicity, it's one of the greatest mysteries of our faith, and it also invites us to consider how unity and difference can coexist in our own lives.
Now, we can't mistake unity for conformity or submission because the Trinity shows us a different kind of unity, one that celebrates distinctiveness while remaining deeply connected.
What would it look like if we took that blueprint and applied it to ourselves?
What if we trusted that our differences and complexities don't need to be controlled or minimized, but embraced as a part of a larger whole within us, a whole that is even trustworthy unto itself?
So in practice, this is very hard. I say all this as if it's super easy and makes sense, but it's very messy in practice, because it means letting go of the need to control every part of ourselves and our lives.
Often when we are in these moments of just being undone, that is, when we begin to to grasp for control.
When maybe we're grasping for control in systems or structures or relationships, or just ourselves.
Maybe this comes out as us saying things like, can't we just do it the way that we always have? I don't want to change.
We clamp down, we dig our heels in, we tighten our grip, and we resist any kind of change, because that just risks that there's unknown ahead of us.
But what if we trusted ourselves to stand at the edge of this undoing, to face the uncertainty of not knowing exactly who we will be, or what our lives might look like in six months, in a year, or even ten years from now?
Rob Bell describes mystery.
He describes mystery not as something we can never know, but something we can know endlessly. I'm going to read it one more time because it's a really good quote and one to think on. Mystery isn't something we can't know. It's something that we can know endlessly.
What would it look like for you to trust that mystery within yourself?
What if we could be curious with ourselves, open to what comes up within us, and seek it with compassionate curiosity rather than hostility or abandonment or avoidance?
This doesn't mean that we throw out conviction or vision or direction.
We're talking about radical acceptance here, which isn't surrendering to chaos, but it's about opening ourselves to what we can't control without judgment.
It's about opening our tightly clenched fists and offering them to ourselves and to others and God, trusting that true faith doesn't diminish who we are, but integrates us more deeply.
Integrity, after all, is about wholeness.
And to live a life of faith with integrity is to be able to bring all parts of ourselves into alignment and trusting that God will meet us there.
I'm going to quote one of our lovely co lead ministers, Janelle, and at the same time plug our podcast episode that comes out tomorrow. You will hear this idea a little more filled out. In it, Janelle says, God does not meet us when we are pretending.
Now, this doesn't mean that God is going to leave or abandon you the minute that you do something. Inauthentically, we know that God is ever present. But what Janelle was trying to get at here is that trusting our inner wisdom and accepting the many versions of ourselves, resisting self abandonment, that can draw us closer to God, to the divine, we are many. There are so many elements that make up who we are, and yet they all live within us and make us us. It makes me me and you you.
And we are made in the image of a God who is somehow many, but also, mysteriously one.
It is good news that we have the freedom to sit in all of this, to not be coerced into someone or something we're not. But to allow all of these things to make up who we are, to coexist, is one.
I'd like to invite our music team to come up front, and as they do that, I would like to leave you with a blessing, a benediction prayer from Henry Nouwen.
He says, dear God, I am so afraid to open my clenched fists.
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands and discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give to me.
Amen.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: 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.
