Bible Study for Advent 1, Lk 20 - 21
Bedtime Chapel's weekly Bible Study supports families to make sense of the Bible readings in the upcoming night prayer services. You can find a list of the upcoming prayer service and readings here.
In this episode, Gary Commins joins us to discuss the Bible readings for Advent 1. Gary and Natalie know each other from their shared interested in creating new community-centered ministries. He is a retired Episcopal priest and his most recent book is Evil and the Problem of Jesus. Key moments in the podcast include:
00:29 Introduction to Gary
05:20 Jesus in the Season of Advent
07:35 Talking about the Violence in Scripture as a Family
10:30 Parable of the Wicked Tenants
12:57 Encouraging Curiosity in Children
Things we talked about on this episode:
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00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly scripture study episode. I'm the Reverend Natalie Thomas.
00:00:07 James Thomas
And I'm the Reverend James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:12 Natalie Thomas
Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families who are trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:21 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. Tonight's episode we'll be covering the readings for the first week of Advent 2024.
00:00:29 Natalie Thomas
We're here today with Gary Commons, who we know who I know for some time now. When I met Gary, he was in Long beach and we invited him to join us. Well, one, just because I have a huge respect for Gary's faith, his integrity, his authenticity, his wit, and also I have known in our relationship come to know that as much as he loves all of his roles, his role as Zach's father is at the very top of the list.
00:00:59 Natalie Thomas
And in a podcast that's looking to form kids in the home in their faith, I thought Gary would be a great guest and I'll let him introduce himself a little bit more. So, Gary, if you could just share a little bit about you and your life and a short introduction to your own faith story that will help the Bedtime Chapel community get to know you.
00:01:17 Gary Commins
Sure. Thank you. So, yeah, I am Gary Cummins. There is no other. And was ordained a priest in 1980. So. And retired in 2020. Did 40 years in active ministry and now I've been retired for a little over four and happy. Felt very, very blessed to be a priest. An active priest for 40 years and also I feel blessed to be retired.
00:01:37 Gary Commins
A little bit about my spiritual journey may hearten parents to know that your children can grow up and have very strong faith even without a lot of parental influence. I didn't go to church until I was 9 or 10. I have three brothers. None of us went to church until then, but I took to it immediately, which surprised me.
00:01:57 Gary Commins
And looking back, knowing that my first Sunday school teacher had anger management issues, that was not perfect either. But I really took to it and remember praying and leaning my head against a pew and that was very meaningful to me. I still to this day cannot understand why I felt at home and church when I had never been in church before.
00:02:16 Gary Commins
I took my faith very seriously as a child and as a teenager. Confirmation class in those days was when you were 12. I remember going through confirmation class and realizing that there was a conflict within me that I was at that time doing judo lessons and throwing kids around the room and they were throwing me around the room.
00:02:35 Gary Commins
And something struck me that maybe Jesus didn't want me to be violent. So I wrestled with that. When I was 12 and 13 and 14, I was very active in church. I was very fortunate to grow up in a church that respected me as a child and as a teenager. I remember having almost a mystical experience when I was 16 while the priest was talking about his faith in Jesus.
00:02:56 Gary Commins
And I felt what I think John Wesley described as a heart strangely warmed. I had no idea what was happening to me at the time, but it just confirmed for me that what he was saying was true. Just all caps. This is really true. So that was very much a part of my childhood.
00:03:14 Gary Commins
And I know people talk disparagingly about the Church of Empire and I did grow up in one of those, but I met Jesus there. So even in places that may not be perfect and no church is, we can still meet Jesus. I grew up a long time ago. Time civil rights movement, war in Vietnam and all that was very much a part of my faith journey.
00:03:36 Gary Commins
When I was 15 and 16, I volunteered in summers in Compton, California, at an Episcopal church there. Just a social consciousness was part of my upbringing. I had no idea I was going to be a priest until I was 23. I was in grad school, thought I was going to become a professor.
00:03:52 Gary Commins
And all of a sudden I had these feelings that kept me awake at night. And it was a very. Actually a very painful experience for me. But after a few months I became convinced that that's what I was going to do. So I did, I did. And seminary was an eye opening experience in terms of intellectual development.
00:04:09 Gary Commins
That was very important to me. Got ordained, as I said, in 1980. A few years later, when I was a college chaplain, I took a class at the university or was asked to take a class by a professor in Christian mysticism. That took me off in a whole other direction and became very much a part of my spiritual life.
00:04:25 Gary Commins
Was reading Christian mystics. And just as a preacher and a priest and a pastor, you know, I always felt a need to continually try to keep myself grounded in my faith, in prayer and in study both. And it was a joy to be a part of various communities, various congregations, ministering to each other and ministering with each other to other people.
00:04:49 Gary Commins
And as I said, it was an incredible blessing for me and retired and that's had its own spiritual challenges. I retired two weeks before the pandemic hit, so it was not the retirement I expected at first, but I still take part in a regular church community, just go as a parishioner most of the time.
00:05:07 Gary Commins
Occasionally fill in on Sundays for two or three priests who are friends, and when they're on vacation, I fill in for them. But other than that, I'm just a person in the pews these days and feel like that's pretty much what I'm called to be right now.
00:05:20 James Thomas
All right, thank you. Thank you for introducing yourselves and thank you for being our first guest on this podcast that we've launched. You mentioned meeting Jesus, and I think it occurs to us that we're in this season of Advent, and there's a lot we could say about the commercialism and capitalism and all that, but also the drive towards the Baby Jesus, the Baby in the manger, which is particularly important, I think, in the tradition that the three of us share.
00:05:48 James Thomas
But here we are starting our Advent cycle of readings with some texts that seem very far away from the Baby in the Manger. We have some challenging things happening. Some of the core material we're in Luke 20 this week, and Jesus in his arguments as he. As we find him, with his detractors, leading up over the next few weeks as we move through Advent to his arrest and the violence that befalls him.
00:06:12 James Thomas
So, you know, do you have any thoughts at this time of year? People who are out there listening, they're in a more materialistic world and trying to find their way into an Advent mindset. How do we square this material from Luke 20 with, you know, sort of the good feels of Christmas with these challenging encounters that we're reading this week?
00:06:35 Gary Commins
The liturgical calendar takes us through all kinds of seasons and all kinds of moods. And Advent, while it is a season of hope, is also a season of conflict. And in a way that gets us to the birth of Jesus, I think a little town of Bethlehem has the hopes and fears. Fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
00:06:54 Gary Commins
And so those hopes and fears are already found in a different way, as you said, with an adult Jesus and these questions and confrontations that he has when he gets to Jerusalem at the end of his ministry. It does seem a little jarring, but maybe jarring isn't a bad thing right now in the world.
00:07:11 Gary Commins
This juxtaposition of Jesus as he comes to Jerusalem and has all these, the height of the confrontations at the end of his life. And then that leads us back to the baby Jesus, who we know from the beginning is going to have those confrontations throughout his life and especially at the end of his life.
00:07:28 Gary Commins
So I think it is as Advent always is, it's a time of preparation. But this time I think it's a jarring kind of preparation.
00:07:35 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, that really resonates for me, you know, as someone who has prepared twice to give birth to a baby. No, for real. I mean, to a child. And we almost always read in one of our Advent readings on Sunday about the birth pains prior. And it is true that this foretelling of the conflict and the strife and just the work, the laboring of society to confront Jesus.
00:08:01 Natalie Thomas
Right. You know, that is the preparation that's happening both in the foreshadowing and then also, I imagine, in the very real incarnate experience of Mary, too, as she prepared. So you mentioned the conflict and the fighting, and there are a few stories from Luke 20 that we're about to read that just have themes of straight violence in them.
00:08:24 Natalie Thomas
And parents are going to be listening to these stories with their children. What advice do you have as a teacher and parent about how maybe to prepare kids or to support kids if they have questions about the violence and. Or fears about the violence?
00:08:41 Gary Commins
Sure. I think, you know, one of the things I felt about being a parent, which is also true of leadership, is that so much of your life is responding. You like to think that you're initiating and that things are going to go the way you guide them. But a good deal of being a parent is responding and reacting to your child.
00:09:00 Gary Commins
So when it comes to stories of violence, I mean, I think children already have a sense of that. It depends on the age, of course, and where they are developmentally. But, I mean, I can think both of an experience in my son's life and in my life that I had not prepared him and I had not been prepared.
00:09:16 Gary Commins
For me, it was going to a friend's house when I was in elementary school and with my friend making fun of his mother's Eastern European accent. And then seeing the numbers from the concentration camp on her arm, which I recognized, I knew what those were. And so we no longer made fun of her accent after that.
00:09:33 Gary Commins
So somehow I already knew that there had been a Holocaust. I knew there was violence. I mean, I grew up in a Jewish community, so I really knew it. And for my son, it was when another, a classmate brought a bullet to school when he was in second grade. And how do you talk about that?
00:09:49 Gary Commins
That. And then a year later was 9/11, and, you know, picking him up at school at the end of the day. And they had watched on tv. I don't know why they did that, but they had watched on TV and seen what had happened. And he knew I was going to. I had a business trip to New York City the next month, and the first thing he did was grab my hand and say, you can't go to New York.
00:10:11 Gary Commins
So children are going to pick things up whether we want to or not. And I'm was big on trying to shield him from things unnecessarily, but, you know, it just sneaks in. And so to have gospel stories that allow children to imagine things, especially imagining violence, is not a bad thing because as was once said, you know, the Bible without sex and violence would be 25 pages long.
00:10:37 James Thomas
Yeah.
00:10:38 Gary Commins
You know, there's just, there's a lot in it. And so to me, it's a very realistic book. The particular parable about the wicked tenants has often been under misunderstood and used to fuel antisemitism. That's not what it's about. I take it as a continuation of a prophetic ministry. Jesus has a prophetic ministry.
00:10:57 Gary Commins
And I take it as a warning that there can be cause and effect. And if you do, if you commit acts of violence, you may be subject to an act of violence. Now, that isn't always true, but we can see from contemporary world events that sometimes it's true, true. And so I see Jesus using this parable as a warning.
00:11:17 Gary Commins
And it's specifically addressed to the chief priests and the scribes and the elders, who are the people who ask the first couple questions in the 20th chapter of Luke. And we already know that they're the ones who are going to crucify, have Jesus crucified. That's already been stated in the Gospel. So when they are the ones who start asking questions, you know that it's not a friendly audience.
00:11:38 Gary Commins
And that continues with the Sadducees later in the chapter. But I think Jesus is specifically talking to them. And so it's a warning to them. And I, you know, I warned my son, if he was ever in a house and somebody had a gun, to immediately call me or to just get out of there and come home again.
00:11:56 Gary Commins
That's. I had to tell him that, you know, I think probably when he was 7, you know, in second grade, after the bullet came to school. So again, a lot of what we may want to shield them, but they are, and I'm not against that at all. You don't want to take a child to a terribly violent movie.
00:12:11 Gary Commins
But on the other hand, they're going to find out and know what the world is about. And then you have to respond to that and try to Give them context. And you do that, I think, ahead of time as well, but primarily in your relationship with them. You know, if you build a relationship of trust with your children, as you know, you're winging it all along.
00:12:27 Gary Commins
But if there's love there and you respect your child and they obviously hopefully love and respect you in return, then you have the capacity to look at these things and talk about them.
00:12:36 James Thomas
Thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you. Another thing in this week's readings is just kind of a theme of questioning that's there with Jesus as he is meeting these folks and they're asking him questions and challenging him. And we love this side of Jesus that's so good at disarming these hostile questions and so good at answering so effectively.
00:12:57 James Thomas
We think one of the themes for this week is really about a spirit of curiosity in the disciples and in the followers of Jesus. We were remembering one of the great prayers in the prayer book at the conclusion of baptism to give an inquiring and discerning heart. What do you think we can say here as we move through this material from Luke over the next couple weeks and this week, particularly about encouraging curiosity and a spirit of curiosity and that inquiring and discerning heart?
00:13:24 Gary Commins
That's a great question. I think, for one thing, you get to build on a child's natural curiosity. I mean, children are just curious. They're discovering. They have a sense of wonder about the beautiful things in the world and hope. Hopefully we hang on to a lot of that. I think just encouraging them to speak is encouraging them to ask questions.
00:13:44 Gary Commins
You know, I put in the context, actually, for children the same as adults. You know, Saint Anselm talked about faith, seeking, understanding. And that's, you know, what you want for your child is to cultivate a place for them to pray together, to pray with you, and then they will ask questions. And the only way to discourage that is to not answer questions or not, or try not to answer the questions.
00:14:09 Gary Commins
I think I said something to you and recently about, you know, Frederick Douglass wrote in one of his later speeches that when he was six years old, he asked himself, “why am I a slave?” And I didn't get that kind of profundity from my son. But I remember when he was 4, we were driving along one day and he asked me, how did Jesus get out of the hole by which he was trying to talk about the resurrection?
00:14:30 Gary Commins
And so there's one you can't answer. I said, well, nobody was there. Nobody was there. Nobody really knows. And then he Said, well, why did God send Jesus? So then he asked a question about the Incarnation at the age of four. And I did my best to try to answer that for a four year old and you know, but also as a priest, just, you know, and being doing sermon, children's sermons with preschool groups and you know, I remember one time a four year old asked me if I was God, you know, in the middle of the church service.
00:15:02 Gary Commins
And his father was very embarrassed. And I told him afterwards, I said, look, you know, next time ask your own questions, don't send your son, ask your question. I think you just play on there and do not discourage their natural curiosity and their sense of wonder because kids are going to ask questions and some of them are going to be silly and others are going to be.
00:15:23 Gary Commins
They're going to have deep, kind of deep questions sometimes and you just never know what you're going to get. But if you treat them with respect and retreat the questions with respect, then I think, you know, that it just encourages them to ask more.
00:15:36 Natalie Thomas
Yeah, I'm struck by what you're saying, that sometimes the questions that our kids ask are challenging for us because we may not have the answer that we want or they, you know, like you said about how did Jesus get out of the hole? Or why did God send Jesus? They're questions that in fact we're still asking ourselves too, if we're being honest about it and putting.
00:16:00 Natalie Thomas
And how can the curiosity of our kids draw us into the ongoing curiosity of knowing God more? That's actually one of the reasons that this podcast started, is that the adults, not just in our particular parish, but in the wider church with whom we engaged the formation that was available to them, stopped around confirmation class or near after and just acknowledging that we need a space to really be on our journeys together and continue asking these questions.
00:16:35 Natalie Thomas
And if we stop asking the questions, that's when our faith stops growing. Yeah. Well, Gary, we're really grateful for your time with us today and we're going to be with you again next week to go through the readings for Advent 2. Is there anything else that you want to say before we say goodnight?
00:16:51 Gary Commins
I would just say don't be afraid of not having the answer and just being honest with them and saying, that's a good question and I'm going to think about it, or I don't really know that either and I'm going to ask somebody. The other thing is simply for adults, as you say, to do their own education, that if you're going to answer a child's question, you need to have your own adult answers for yourself and your own adult perspectives for yourself.
00:17:15 Gary Commins
So part of being, I think, an effective parent and responding to your children's faith needs is developing your own as an adult. And the church has not often been good at adult education. To say what you know is to reflect on what you were saying. But there are resources and there are people who can point you to resources.
00:17:34 Gary Commins
And there are a million books out there and lots of ways to learn. And to do that in community is.
00:17:40 Natalie Thomas
Very helpful, too, including Gary's books, which I heartily recommend to people.
00:17:46 James Thomas
And we will be discussing a bit next week.
00:17:49 Natalie Thomas
Yes. Yes.
00:17:50 Gary Commins
Which is great.
00:17:52 Natalie Thomas
Well, thank you, Gary. Thank you to my beloved husband across.
00:17:56 James Thomas
The table and to you.
00:17:58 Natalie Thomas
Yes. And thank you to all of you who are listening and are part of this community. If you're looking to stay in touch with us, you can find us not on all the socials, but on Facebook and on Instagram at Bedtime Chapel and also at our website, Bedtime Chapel. And we are very grateful that you're part of this community that we're starting and look forward to getting to know you on there.
