SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah, Christ is risen.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord is risen indeed.
SPEAKER_00: Alleluia.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.
SPEAKER_00: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord be with you, and also with you.
SPEAKER_00: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_00: Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life.
SPEAKER_00: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Filled with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus is standing in the right hand of God.
SPEAKER_04: Like newborn infants, I long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.
SPEAKER_04: If indeed you have tasted it, that the Lord is good.
SPEAKER_04: Become to him a living stone, though rejected by mortals, yet chosen and precious in godly light.
SPEAKER_04: And like a living stone, let yourself be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, and to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_04: For it stands in Scripture, Today I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
SPEAKER_04: For for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner, and the stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.
SPEAKER_04: But you are a chosen race of a royal priesthood and a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
SPEAKER_04: Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people.
SPEAKER_04: Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy by the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_03: So strength has made joy, my love, my heart, such a joy as my can, so much a love as my camp, such so much as joy in love.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus told his disciples, Do not let your hearts be troubled.
SPEAKER_00: Believe in God, believe also in me.
SPEAKER_00: In my Father's house there are many dwelling places.
SPEAKER_00: If it were not so, but I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you.
SPEAKER_00: And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am there you may be also.
SPEAKER_00: And you know the way to the place where I am going.
SPEAKER_00: Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going.
SPEAKER_00: How can we know the way?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.
SPEAKER_00: No one comes to the Father except through me.
SPEAKER_00: If you know me, you will know my Father also.
SPEAKER_00: From now on you do know the Father and have seen the Father.
SPEAKER_00: Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to him, Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?
SPEAKER_00: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
SPEAKER_00: How can you say, Show us the Father?
SPEAKER_00: Do you not believe that I am the Father and the Father is in me?
SPEAKER_00: The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.
SPEAKER_00: Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.
SPEAKER_00: But if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.
SPEAKER_00: Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
SPEAKER_00: If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
SPEAKER_00: The Gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Praise to you, Lord Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Here in this fifth week after Easter, uh the Gospel of John is going once again backward to things Jesus said while he was still alive.
SPEAKER_00: This is before the resurrection, so that we can come back after the resurrection and perceive with greater depth and clarity what Jesus was pointing to and how I think we can live into it mentally, spiritually, and as a community.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to put before you first that in this text that is honestly, in my experience, the most common use gospel in celebrating the lives of people at their funerals, we get to hear Jesus say, I am the way and the truth and the life.
SPEAKER_00: None come to the Father except through me.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know your history with this story, but I will tell you, once upon a time, I was a working at a fundamentalist Christian school.
SPEAKER_00: I was a math teacher, and uh I ended up teaching Hebrew Bible for a little bit there.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the most important interview questions when I went from math teacher to Bible teacher by the Bible chair was, are you an inclusivist, an exclusivist, or a universalist?
SPEAKER_00: And that actually had to be explained to me.
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't really familiar with those terms, even though conceptually, once he started, I completely understood uh his what he was doing.
SPEAKER_00: So an exclusivist is somebody who says, Listen, uh, if you don't know the name of Jesus, if you have not prayed the sinner's prayer, that is, God, I'm a sinner and I'm bad, and I invite Jesus into my heart, my Lord and Savior who took my place to pay for my sins, if you haven't done that, then you are going to hell when you die, no matter how good your life was, no matter how much you tried to love, uh, even if you grew up in a country where Jesus' name was never preached or proclaimed, so you had no access.
SPEAKER_00: Exclusivists.
SPEAKER_00: The next position uh was called inclusivism, which is um you may not know Jesus by name, but you can still know him by spirit, which is so imagine that you uh grow up, let's pretend in a remote part of Australia, you grow up in the bush and you've never heard uh the name Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, the law of God is written in your heart.
SPEAKER_00: So if you have all in reverence uh for the world and for uh for God as you are able to understand God, you can make it in.
SPEAKER_00: This is really interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Uh C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis writes about this in the book The Last Battle in the Chronicles of Narnia.
SPEAKER_00: Um there is in the book Azlan, who clearly represents Jesus, and then there's this sort of other god called Taz, and Taz, we all know from the Gekga, was a false god.
SPEAKER_00: Well, in the last battle, uh the high priest of Taz shows up before Azlan, and Azlan says, Hey, good job, come on into my country.
SPEAKER_00: And and the high priest of Taz says, Well, I never worshiped you, I was worshiping Taz.
SPEAKER_00: And Azlan says, Well, in fact, you were worshiping me all along.
SPEAKER_00: So this inclusivist position, this way of hearing the story, um, is that uh, hey, you may not know explicitly the name, uh, but it is in fact that God is everywhere at all times, and so um you can proceed on the way that God has set before you, even if you don't know the explicit language.
SPEAKER_00: Um the third position, universalism, is is uh pretty pretty easy to understand, which is in the end, you could say everybody gets out of jail free, but I think a better way to understand it is in the in the end, love wins.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when we hear this story, I am the way and the truth and the life, none comes to the Father except through me.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's really easy to understand how somebody might take the exclusivist position and say, look, if you don't know Jesus, you're not gonna make it.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, or an inclusivist might say, uh, hey, Jesus paved the road that you can walk, whether you know who paved the road or not, you're walking on it.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, of course, if you're a universalist, I suppose you could say, hey, look, um, since Jesus paved the road, you're on it no matter what you believe, you get to walk that way.
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you, I am really convinced that the resurrected uh Jesus is not trying to up the ante as to who gets into heaven and who gets into hell or what the means are.
SPEAKER_00: I think this passage is maybe really best understood in inviting us as a resurrected community not to consider who's in and who's out and whether or not Jesus is the end of faith.
SPEAKER_00: I think what's really interesting to hear is the resurrected Jesus is the way of faith.
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus doesn't say, I am the end, the truth and the life.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I am the way.
SPEAKER_00: Come to the Father through me, with me, alongside me.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I think what that invites us to consider is that we can make decisions and we can treat other people in ways in which exclude or include or are universal.
SPEAKER_00: And the question is, right, when we exclude other people, are we presenting life to them or are we taking life away from them?
SPEAKER_00: And this, I think, this whole conversation of salvation, I think, is really, really important because there's an Episcopal priest called Barbara Brown Taylor who says salvation happens anytime someone with a key to a lock uses that key to unlock a lock that they just as well could have locked.
SPEAKER_00: So salvation is about unlocking doors.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to put before you that this exclusivist position, if we read this way into the scriptures, it essentially has us quarantining others, locking them up, locking them up away because they don't have the faith that we have or the look that we believe is supposed to be right.
SPEAKER_00: So we end up with these uh quarantines to protect an identity that maybe isn't really worth protecting in the end.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I'm not talking about public health, I'm talking about our spiritual identity and where we identify our center here.
SPEAKER_00: Um I want to put before you that I think if we hear this in an exclusivist way, my question is where's the life?
SPEAKER_00: And where's the truth?
SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think uh hopefully this other passage we get to hear today from Peter really invites us into consideration of how Jesus begins the whole process, which is in my father's house there are many rooms.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to put before you because I got to live there, and I don't know if you've if you've read this, there's this uh great account uh by the by one of two American witnesses to this uh terrible um accident in history, the firebombing of Dresden.
SPEAKER_00: So I used to live in Dresden, and the year I moved there in Germany, they had just finished rebuilding this monumental church called the Frauenkirke.
SPEAKER_00: And um, of course, the Allies destroyed the entire city of Dresden, in general, we think punitively, after the bombing of Coventry in World War II, and the Frauenkirke was one of them.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see actually that out of this giant, huge church, this window was about the only thing left standing.
SPEAKER_00: What was really interesting about the rebuilding of Dresden is that it frankly would have been a lot easier to just push it all down, throw it all away, and rebuild them.
SPEAKER_00: But uh when the Frauenkirche was rebuilt, at the time, the German architects used the most sophisticated computers that they had available, and they tried literally to use every rock that there was that had not been completely incinerated or made absolutely useless.
SPEAKER_00: And so you'll see with their computer modeling, not only did the this particular window stay intact, but peppered throughout the building, they found how they could salvage even the most burned up, black and charred bits and incorporate them into the structure.
SPEAKER_00: And in 1 Peter, that's exactly what we get to hear, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: That the stone the builder rejected has become the cornerstone.
SPEAKER_00: People said Jesus is used up, he died, he'd had a horrible death, God should not suffer, and that's exactly what God had in mind in rebuilding the temple.
SPEAKER_00: And what's really interesting is the temple God's building is not, hey, you're a temple of the Holy Spirit, I'm a temple of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: No, the scriptures are very clear.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all, we all are temples of the Holy Spirit, and God, the master architect, is really interested in making sure that even tiny little rocks like this one you see here are not thrown out, even though, of course, it is much more expensive and lugubrious to use them.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is the kind of community that God is interested in building, one in which nobody is wasted, one in which, frankly, it may take more time, but the miracle of redemption in this building is just a shadow to what God wants to do with us, with human beings, frankly, Christian or not.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think we get to hear this really interesting bit.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says, in my Father's house, there are many rooms.
SPEAKER_00: Or sometimes you might hear, there are many mansions.
SPEAKER_00: In the Frauenkirke, it turns out there's a couple of different chapels.
SPEAKER_00: And this is really interesting.
SPEAKER_00: Um, if you follow C.
SPEAKER_00: S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis at all, C.
SPEAKER_00: S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis says, hey, uh, in God's house there are many rooms, and maybe the best way to understand those rooms are the different denominations.
SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, there's the Episcopal room, there's the Lutheran room, there's the Methodist room.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes what we don't realize is that we're all within the same house.
SPEAKER_00: So we just like to stay in our own rooms, and hey, maybe there's some benefit to us getting out and walking in the hallways so we have in a little more contact with each other because after all, we live in the same house.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to suggest to you that part of what the gospel promises us today is that there aren't only many rooms for people who look like us and believe it like us.
SPEAKER_00: The question is, is God big enough to make rooms for people who are utterly different from us?
SPEAKER_00: Is God big enough to take burned-out block kind of people?
SPEAKER_00: People who are hopeless and full of despair, people who come across to us as, wow, not following best practices.
SPEAKER_00: Is God able to take those people and make room for them in God's house?
SPEAKER_00: And of course, as God is able to do that, then we're invited to join God in that work.
SPEAKER_00: So I think in some ways that flips the whole beginning to this.
SPEAKER_00: Are you an exclusivist, an inclusivist, or a universalist all around?
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you in some ways, I think we could get bogged down with what happens after we die, and of course that's very important.
SPEAKER_00: But I do think part of what the resurrected Jesus is asking us to do is consider how do we choose to live.
SPEAKER_00: Now this week it's Mother's Day, and um you know I can tell you I probably wouldn't have any faith if my mother hadn't been so faithful in her own life, and I'm sure that's true for many of you.
SPEAKER_00: And I've had not only my biological mother, but I've had many mothers in my life who have chosen me to nourish and nurture me in faith.
SPEAKER_00: And um, if you watch the video on Monica this week, Monica, the uh St.
SPEAKER_00: Augustine's uh mother, who ended up not only nourishing him in life, but nourishing his conversion into larger life into Christianity, I um mentioned this story that I find really, really compelling from Jewish mysticism from the Kabbalah about how it is that God does this work.
SPEAKER_00: So, according to the Kabbalah, you can't create anything without holding yourself back a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: So in the Kabbalah, God was everywhere, everything.
SPEAKER_00: And in order for God to make something different, differentiated, God had to draw back and make a little bit of room, just like a pregnant woman has to make room in her body for an infant.
SPEAKER_00: And so the Kabbalah says, of course, God can never completely withdraw.
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of like pouring oil out of a jug.
SPEAKER_00: The residue will still be there, but God made space for creation within God's self.
SPEAKER_00: And God didn't just quarantine a box, God made space to allow creation to come into being and sent the nutrition and the nourishment and the nutrients so that creation could not just happen but could grow and thrive.
SPEAKER_00: And the Kavala is really clear that God and creation are not the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: That God made room for creation to be, well, itself.
SPEAKER_00: Not just a product, but to be able to be creative itself.
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if that isn't an approach we can have to there being many rooms in God's house.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes maybe I think it's easy to look At another person and say, boy, uh, I would not be your bunkmate.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's a fair way to set a boundary.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I would prefer not to share a room in God's house with you.
SPEAKER_00: But I wonder where in God's house you are.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if I couldn't walk the hallway and find you there.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you're confused about what house you dwell in.
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you a tour of God's house and all the possibilities because I have the conviction that you do fit in somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I have the conviction that no matter how burned out or broken out you feel, God the master architect is able to knit you in at this one point.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you, this building is remarkable to see.
SPEAKER_00: There's something almost haunting about it.
SPEAKER_00: Because they've left it in here, it's not uniform, but it is unified.
SPEAKER_00: And this, I think, is part of what the resurrected Jesus has in mind.
SPEAKER_00: After all, Jesus doesn't come back unwounded.
SPEAKER_00: He comes back with his wounds for all to see, and uh he even invites people to have contact with them.
SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit about what God, the master architect, I think, is doing in a situation like Dresden.
SPEAKER_00: God is able to hold all of the apparent diversity we have together in God's hands in unity.
SPEAKER_00: And I think, I would think that we're invited to be that building.
SPEAKER_00: So the question that sometimes we settle for is the efficiency.
SPEAKER_00: I don't see where you fit.
SPEAKER_00: Instead of, boy, how could we figure out how we fit in together even when we disagree on certain items?
SPEAKER_00: How can we fit in together to build a building that will have enough rooms to hold even more diversity than we have in ourselves?
SPEAKER_00: I want to suggest to you, I think that has to be the gospel because it's so much bigger than the way I naturally am.
SPEAKER_00: I think it has to be the gospel because it's full of life with a capital L.
SPEAKER_00: And it involves us, of course, spending more effort so that more people fit into God's house.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe we've even said it the other way around.
SPEAKER_00: In the end, everybody fits into God's house.
SPEAKER_00: The question is, do we live that way or not?
SPEAKER_00: Do we choose to live in small cubbies in God's house, or do we choose to roam wild in a huge mansion?
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a hopeful, hopeful text, but it also invites us, frankly, to do some really hard work.
SPEAKER_00: And if we can't see how somebody fits into the temple of God, it's not God's mistake, it's a failure of our imagination and our creativity.
SPEAKER_00: And God asks us, I think, as a resurrected community, to open ourselves more, not less.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus ends up ending this passage with something really, really interesting.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Whatever ask you ask the Father in my name, I'll give you.
SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, in the exclusivist position that I started with, we could hear that as a magic spell, like hocus pocus, I use the name of Jesus, I get what I want.
SPEAKER_00: But you know, biblically, somebody's name is their entire being.
SPEAKER_00: So I think the question is: when we ask God to do something in our world, and we ask it fully funneled through the experience of the resurrected Jesus who is able to knit people into God's kingdom that we had no room for, then of course God is, I think, delighted to work with us through us.
SPEAKER_00: So I put before you to ask in Jesus' name this week that God would effect reconciliation on earth as God is going to do in heaven, and that God would do that through us so that we can be a resurrected community, that we can be unified in mission, and that we can have rooms in God's house big enough to fit all kinds of people, and we can run through those rooms celebrating together what God has done.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the next couple of weeks, because we're talking about this, we are going to explore a few different statements of faith and creeds throughout the world, because after all, there are many rooms in God's house.
SPEAKER_00: When we come back together and have the Eucharist, we'll stick with the Nicene Creed that we're used to.
SPEAKER_00: But for the next few weeks, I want us to take an opportunity, because frankly, we can, to reconsider our faith, to reaffirm our faith in some different creedal statements from different groups, from different rooms in God's house.
SPEAKER_00: And so this week we'll be looking at a Maasai version of the Creed.
SPEAKER_00: We'll be looking at a new version of the Creed from the United Church of Canada in weeks to come, on and on.
SPEAKER_00: And this is, of course, so that we can expand our vision of the rooms in God's house.
SPEAKER_00: So when we come back together, we're able to say, yes, here we are.
SPEAKER_00: We've made the grand tour, and here is also where we live.
SPEAKER_00: I pray that you are both safe and sane and making room not only for God, but for your neighbor in these times.
SPEAKER_00: I invite you to renew and reconsider your faith in the words of a Masai Creed.
SPEAKER_00: We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it.
SPEAKER_00: God created humankind and wanted us to be happy in the world.
SPEAKER_00: God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth.
SPEAKER_00: We have known this high God in darkness, and now we know God in the light.
SPEAKER_00: God promised in the books of God's Word, the Bible, that God would save the world and all the nations and tribes.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that God made good God's promise by sending God's Son Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and humanity, showing the meaning of religion is love.
SPEAKER_00: He was rejected by his own people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross and died.
SPEAKER_00: He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave.
SPEAKER_00: He ascended to the skies, he is the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that all our sins are forgiven through Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: All who have faith in Jesus must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again.
SPEAKER_00: We are waiting for Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He is alive, he lives, this we believe.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_05: Let's pray for the church and for the world.
SPEAKER_05: Live together in your love and reveal your glory in the world.
SPEAKER_05: Lord and your compassion.
SPEAKER_05: We pray for all the government and all the authority and every nation.
SPEAKER_05: Encourage those who disput, and lead those to be full of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: The peace of the Lord be always with you, and also with you.
SPEAKER_00: And now, as our Saviour Christ has taught us, we are bold to pray.
SPEAKER_00: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: May God the Father, who has redeemed us and made us children of God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, bestow upon you new joy, the riches of God's favor.
SPEAKER_00: May the Holy Spirit, who through the waters of baptism has raised us from sin and into newness of life, lead you into the mission and holiness of being God's own forever.
SPEAKER_00: And may Jesus, who has brought us out of bondage to sin and into truth and lasting freedom as our Redeemer, guide you to live into your eternal inheritance.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be upon you this day and remain upon with you forever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Alleluia, Alleluia.