Advent 2 Bible Study: Luke 21, Luke 22, John 8

00:00:00 Natalie Thomas

Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly scripture study episode. I'm the Reverend Natalie Thomas.

00:00:06 James Thomas

I'm the Reverend James Thomas. We're deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

00:00:11 Natalie Thomas

Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to offer resources to families who are trying to center Jesus in their home in a post Christian world.

00:00:20 James Thomas

We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for the second week of Advent.

00:00:29 Natalie Thomas

And we are here today with Gary Commins, who was here with us last week as well. And rather than reintroducing himself again, we're going to invite you. If you missed the last episode, either go back and listen to his introduction or you can find it on our website. Gary, I'm going to ask you to share a little bit more about yourself with the Bedtime Chapel community and in particular, what role you've had in raising faithful children in the church and how engaging with children and younger people in general has shaped your way of seeing God.

00:01:04 Gary Commins

Sure, I have engaged with children in various ways. I'm not an expert in religious education or child development, but worked at several schools that had preschools and would do some kind of preschool chapel with them. Did a lot of children's sermons in churches over the years, often in consultation with a Christian education director or someone who was really knew more professionally about children than I did.

00:01:30 Gary Commins

And also just the incorporation of children into a church community and having them be present and front and center taking part in worship. It was really important for children to feel at home. And some of my really wonderful memories of church were seeing sometimes children who were new at the church a year before and then walking into church holding another child's hand and showing them where to sit and stand and all this stuff.

00:01:56 Gary Commins

So the first child had become really welcome and felt at home there. And so creating a church community in which children can thrive, I think has been a bit part of my ministry. And I think that's very helpful for adults, not just for children or for youth, but it's helpful for adults to hear children's questions, to see what happens in interactions with children.

00:02:19 Gary Commins

And I know different times. I remember a children's sermon where it was around Thanksgiving time. So naturally you ask children what they're thankful for. And these two boys who had been adopted in elementary school both said how grateful they were to be adopted. And their two dads told me afterwards that they had never heard that before and how powerful it was for them to hear that in front of the whole Church, but also just for them to hear it.

00:02:47 Gary Commins

Because, you know, you adopt children when they're, I think they were seven and nine, something like that. And it's a much different experience than raising a child from birth. So it really helps the whole community. And I know I wrote about this once, but having a youth group ask questions in church and one of the youth asked, why are some people's lives so much harder than others?

00:03:12 Gary Commins

And you could just hear the whole congregation respond to that, that a 13 year old was thinking that deeply. And it's, you know, it can be very powerful, the witness of children and their ministry to adults. We shouldn't think of this as a one way street, but as children being a part of a community and enlivening the community and drawing the whole family into the community and expressing things.

00:03:37 Gary Commins

So good experiences with that. Another was getting a church to go. It was a neighboring church, had a food, a lunch program and we went for the first time to go over there and prepare food for about 65 people. And it was mostly Sunday school families that did it. Children were very much a part of serving food to people.

00:03:58 Gary Commins

And it was just a terrific experience of ministry for them and for the families and to see that, hey, this is something that we want to do on a more regular basis. So I think that all those things from a really, probably the perspective of, you know, a parish priest or the head of a church community and how children fit in and how they are not only to be nurtured, but how they help the whole community, I guess is something that I've experienced a lot.

00:04:25 James Thomas

Thank you. So we'd like to bring in the topic of your most recent book. You are the author of several. We know the most recent book being Evil and the Problem of Jesus. And in this week's readings we hear about sin and Satan. And you know, that's tough stuff for parents. I think popular culture likes to sweep that under the carpet.

00:04:49 James Thomas

Might probably fair to say something like that. And what do you think about parents making sense of, to use the very traditional Christian language, the problem of evil that you addressed in this recent book. And we'd love to hear your lens on that given that you've been thinking so much about it.

00:05:05 Gary Commins

Sure. Thank you. I would say obviously evil is a problem and it's a philosophical problem for a lot of people. Why is there evil in the world if God is good? Is often the basic question. And what I tried to do in the book is shift that question a little bit and say, what is Jesus relationship with Evil, because that's much more tangible than abstractions about God.

00:05:31 Gary Commins

And words like omnipotence and omniscience and those are fine, but they aren't very helpful to us. And so to kind of ground the question of evil is how does Jesus react to evil, how does he interact with evil? You know, some of the lessons that we get in Advent are leading towards his murder, his crucifixion.

00:05:52 Gary Commins

And there's betrayal, there's mention of Satan. And so it's very much a big part of this part of Jesus story. You know, it is, you know, Satan enters into Judas in Luke's gospel is part of the story. And you know, that's both John and Luke say that and Matthew and Mark have the story about money, that it's really money that gets Judas attention.

00:06:17 Gary Commins

And you know, Luke's gospel, the temptation story way back in chapter four says that Satan will wait for a more opportune time to come after Jesus. So Satan is unsuccessful at tempting Jesus and so he comes back to destroy him. Basically is kind of Luke's logic of this. And how do you explain evil entering into somebody or taking over somebody?

00:06:42 Gary Commins

You know our traditional word sin is I think very important. We talk about the forgiveness of sins. I think any individual, when you think about your own life, we know we do lots of things that are destructive and or are indifferent to the needs of others who might be crying out for help.

00:07:01 Gary Commins

And that that's sin and that's part of it. And there's the day to day stuff that we do or don't do and evil is connected to that. There's a traditional phrase about the world, the flesh and the devil. The world is social evil which you can see in the gospel stories of the groups of people around Jesus.

00:07:21 Gary Commins

It's interesting that you don't get individuals named until the very get to Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas. But it's these groups of people acting and that's the world social evil, crowds of people. And we know how crowds do not behave well. And the flesh not being physicality, that's just not what the word means, but just the part of us within us that is drawn to destructiveness or drawn to not care about other people or to be entirely self absorbed.

00:07:53 Gary Commins

And then the devil is cosmic evil. And so you have, you know, social evil, personal evil and cosmic evil. And Jesus is, you know, I think the church has focused on Jesus approach to sin and forgiveness. But the church has not done as well at addressing social evil. One of the confessions that some people Use talks about the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.

00:08:17 Gary Commins

And that, I think, is very helpful to think about. But it's just a reality, and it's part of who we are abstractly. Could God have created the human race without evil being an ingredient within us? Who knows? That's very abstract. But what we do know is that evil has been part of the human condition from the beginning and will be.

00:08:39 Gary Commins

It just is. Sin is part of who we are. It is not all of who we are. And I think that's important to say. We are capable of holiness, we are capable of love, we are capable of compassion. And Jesus is always trying to work with people to get them to see what they can do, what they can be, knowing that we'll never finish that journey, but we can always be on that journey.

00:09:01 Gary Commins

That, I think, is pretty clear what Jesus teaches, what he shows us, the way he interacts and confronts evil. He is not shy about confronting evil and cleansing the temple, which is the story just before you get the sections of Luke's Gospel that we read it during Advent. So I think all those things are a part of what we need to know for ourselves.

00:09:23 Gary Commins

And also I think it's important as we address things with children as it comes up and when they do something, how do we address it? I know when my son was in elementary school, he was throwing rocks with friends. And one day, I think it was actually the only time he ever did it, but he hit a car.

00:09:42 Gary Commins

So he got hauled into the principal's office, shamed, told he had to write all this stuff for an apology to the driver of the car and all this other stuff. And of course, he had a stomach ache going to school the next day. And I said, you have to go. You have to get this done.

00:09:57 Gary Commins

But if you still have a stomach ache at lunch, I'll come pick you up. He had a stomach ache at lunch. He had done everything. I picked him up, I said, did you do everything? And he said, yes. I said, well, you never have to think about this again. Never. And if anybody ever brings us up to you, a teacher, principal, if they bring it up, you tell me and I'll go talk to them, because this is over, you've apologized, that's it.

00:10:19 Gary Commins

And I think that that's how we need to understand sin in our lives. And what Jesus says to us, it's over, it's done, you've apologized or whatever else, you've acknowledged your sin, you've confessed, it is finished, through. And I think that then we don't have to carry that stuff with us. If we can accept that it's hard to forgive ourselves.

00:10:38 Gary Commins

That's a whole related but separate question. But to know that we're forgiven and is done, I think is extremely important. And I think that we want our children to know that. I mean, children get in trouble and they do things and how do you discipline them and at the same time let them know it's done?

00:10:58 Gary Commins

You don't have to think about it anymore. And I think the church tries to communicate that to people all the time. And I don't know how successful I was with my son explaining at that time, I hope I was successful. But it's something that we try to do. And the church, of course, is supposed to be a community of forgiveness to help us so that we can face a world in which there is so much evil as a community that builds each other up.

00:11:23 James Thomas

Yeah, thank you. And that's a really great segue to something that we wanted to bring up. You know, if parents who are following along with the lectionary. And here we are in Luke 20 and 21, and then all of a sudden we're sort of out of the middle of nowhere. We have one night this week where we jump over to John Chapter eight.

00:11:39 James Thomas

And if folks at home, if you've got a critical edition of the Bible, it doesn't really matter the translation, just a good commentary Bible, you'll probably see a commentary that. That section From John Chapter 8 is absent from some of the earlier sources. And nobody was quite sure where it belonged. It was out there.

00:11:54 James Thomas

But, you know, in our lectionary pattern, it seems clear that it, when you sequence it out, that he goes out to the Mount of Olives and then comes back. This actually kind of does fit in. It ended up in John, but it may have been material that was out there with the Lucan tradition.

00:12:09 James Thomas

And anyway, we were just, you know, if parents were curious about how that comes to be, that's there. But to follow up on what you were saying, I was saying to Natalie as we were reading this, it interesting when you do put the story of the woman caught in adultery into this context.

00:12:26 James Thomas

This is the thing that's the final straw for the authorities. And the story is a bit opaque. We're not quite sure what he wrote in the sand and how exactly he defended this woman. But this question that you've just raised of shame, particularly in this context, whatever is meant here by adultery and the marital norms of the time or whatever that is meant, this is sort of the point where this is the line that Jesus crosses is the defense of this woman and not allowing her to be publicly shamed, as you just said, you know, the end of that reading being go, this is over, this is done.

00:13:02 James Thomas

I'm releasing you from this. It's okay. And that being the point in the story at which the authorities say, we really, we gotta kill this guy. And, you know, it's just. It's powerful when you hear it in that sequence.

00:13:15 Natalie Thomas

Yeah. And even more so, when James and I were in this conversation about this text, I was saying that not only is the breaking point for the authorities that he sides with a woman and a marginalized person in society then in society today, in many ways still. But he reverses their understanding of the situation.

00:13:36 Natalie Thomas

And if we're talking about encountering evil, they have put her up as an example of evil. And he says, no, you've got this backwards. You are the society societal ill in this situation. I think as you talked, Gary, about how do we understand evil is to look at, you know, look how Jesus engaged with it through his life and look at the ways that he came up against it.

00:13:59 Natalie Thomas

And so often, for me at least, the places of evil that are the most profound and the most clear are, like this teenager said in your church congregation, the places that society has really, I wouldn't say just let down, but intentionally create systems that make it so that people's lives are not the same and not equal.

00:14:22 Natalie Thomas

How do we understand that if it's not to understand an evilness that is the root of it? It surely is bigger than one person. It's a system and it's a structure and it's a cultural belief that gets us here. And perhaps it's the refusal to encounter that as true evil that prevents us from actually addressing it the way it needs to be addressed.

00:14:43 Gary Commins

A couple of responses. One is that the religious people around the woman don't just want her to feel guilty. They want her, as you say, they want her to feel shame. Guilt is about what you do. Shame is about who you are. And they want her to feel shame forever. And Jesus responds, you know, not only to our guilt, but to our shame, that we tend to start to believe that we are the person who does destructive things, that does bad things, and that can really.

00:15:09 Gary Commins

That can hit children especially hard. The other thing about the crowd around the woman reminds me of a quote I used in that book, which is Blaise Pascal. People never commit evil as completely or cheerfully as when they do so from religious conviction, that's rough, but it's true. And we see that in our world today, people who say they're religious and they're off killing people and justifying all kinds of terrible behavior.

00:15:34 Gary Commins

And the other thing about evil, I think. And again, it's a quote. It's a quote from a 19th century rabbi who said that when it comes to evil, we need to circle, bend and transform it. And I think that Jesus teachings and his example are about circling and bending and transforming it. And that's what he does in that story with the woman caught in adultery, is that he kind of circles around it and he twists it around and bends it until he gives the people around the woman the opportunity to see themselves instead of just looking at her and projecting all their sinfulness on her and their shame on her.

00:16:06 Gary Commins

And it gives them an opportunity to see themselves. And that's why they slink away.

00:16:10 Natalie Thomas

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for that. Well, in the midst of this encountering with evil and really grappling with shame, we have the story of the Last Supper. I won't go too much into my own eucharistic theology here, but in my experience, the encountering of Christ in the Eucharist has been a, as you alluded to or quoted in the first episode with us, a warming of the heart that is a physical dispelling of shame and of some sense of not belonging in the story of Jesus.

00:16:43 Natalie Thomas

So I would love for you just to expand on that or go off in a different direction, but to hear from you what it means that we encounter the story of the Last Supper in the context of these readings.

00:16:54 Gary Commins

Yeah, I mean, I think that the Last Supper is. Functions in the way. A lot the way the Eucharist functions for us, that we're maybe not as dramatically, since it's in this story in which Jesus is about to be betrayed, but it's this moment of thanksgiving. Obviously, that's what Eucharist means, this feast time together as a community and as a priest and someone whose whole adult life was shaped around being at the center of celebrations of the Eucharist, it was always for me, just such a privilege and beyond that, a blessing to be a part of a Eucharistic community and to have the role of celebrating the Eucharist.

00:17:35 Gary Commins

And many, many times had the experience at the altar of seeing people differently than I would otherwise. You know, people are a pain in the neck. As I used to preach at Christmas, you know, every church is like a manger scene. There's always an ox in every church and at least one Ass.

00:17:54 Gary Commins

Some people thought I was referring to myself when I said that. But churches were mixed. It's a mixed bag. And yet when people come to the altar, instead of seeing that person is a nasty something or other, which there were some see, the person is broken. There was one woman in one of my churches I referred to as.

00:18:10 Gary Commins

Not to her face, as the curmudgeon of the year, 14 years in a row. And yet when giving her the bread and the wine, I saw her, you know, just for a moment, maybe a glimpse of something that was in her that just was no longer coming out, or, you know, who God created her to be, because she was a brilliant person.

00:18:30 Gary Commins

But the whole thing about loving your neighbors yourself just never occurred to her. So, you know, Jesus comes together at the Last Supper, and Judas is there, who's going to betray him. And Peter is there, who's going to deny that he knows him. And that's part of it. That's part of the church community.

00:18:46 Gary Commins

It's a very flawed place. Churches are flawed at best. And yet this is where we remember and make alive Christ's presence and where we feel Christ's presence. And I know in the Eucharist, many times when I would celebrate the Eucharist, I would forget that I was where I was in church. I still don't know sometimes if I had lost my place, but a paragraph or two of the Eucharistic prayer would go by and I would just be where I, you know, as far as I.

00:19:14 Gary Commins

In my mind, I was alone praying it. And yet I was in the. In the middle of the. Of the church and I was lost in. Prayer is a beautiful thing when it happens, as long as you don't get lost in the liturgy. And I. And I don't think I did, but I think that people, whether you're the celebrant or whether you're in the church, we get lost and in it, in God and in God's grace and in God's generosity.

00:19:42 Gary Commins

And all of that is given in the context of the Gospel of Luke and in the context of our lives with all these terrible things going on around us. And I think it's just so important for us to have those moments where we can have a sense of God's presence. At least it's offered, whether we acknowledge it or feel it.

00:20:02 Gary Commins

You're not going to feel it all the time. But for me now, as a just a parishioner, just being grounded in that on a weekly basis and then being grounded in prayer on a daily basis, it's critically important in the world that we have, especially right now, that just seems to be going haywire in many ways.

00:20:22 Gary Commins

So I think that the Eucharist, you know, still has its. Still a moment in which we look at reality in a different way. It is a moment of peace and it's a moment of receiving God's grace. But it's also, for me, it's a way of re figuring my way of understanding the world in which I'm living.

00:20:41 Gary Commins

And it gets me grounded back to eucharistic eyes to try to look through eucharistic eyes to see the things that are going on around me. It doesn't make the world less tragic, it doesn't mean there's less evil in the world, but it helps me to see it in a. In a, hopefully in a Christ like way.

00:20:59 James Thomas

Thank you. Thank you for all that. And lastly for this week, our last question for this week is. And this, this follows nicely, I think, from what you just said about a different insight. We encounter this question of who shall be greatest and the first shall be last. And this, I think we would think this is among the most important and central to Jesus worldview and teaching.

00:21:20 James Thomas

So what does it look like in 21st century America? How to, how to raise up in children and families the servanthood of Jesus, which is so central to his teaching. But from my money, quite lost in the modern world. Do you have any thoughts on that?

00:21:38 Gary Commins

Yeah, the idea of service is really lost in our society right now. I mean, it's there, people do it. And deacons are examples of our reminders to the whole Christian community that this is actually what life is about. I remember working at a church in not the best area of town, I guess is a good way to put it.

00:22:00 Gary Commins

And I used to despair that we had so little outreach. We were a great community and there were a lot of. It was bilingual and multicultural and that took a lot of energy. But it just didn't feel like we were serving the community. And slowly, some programs to welcome the community in appeared an after school program, Alternatives to violence, a food program, a nutrition and fitness program.

00:22:21 Gary Commins

And I remember with some joy realizing that we were serving more people during the week than we were on Sundays, that we had about 150 people in church on Sunday and we were serving like 200 people a week. So I said, you know, it was like McDonald's. How many people are we serving?

00:22:37 Gary Commins

Not to make money, not to have millions and millions, but how many people are we serving? And that is just the center of what A Christian community is supposed to be about is as a community, how many are we serving? And then as individuals, you know, the whole idea of greatness is so lost today.

00:22:55 Gary Commins

I mean, I have a pet peeve about billionaires. I don't think anyone should be a billionaire. No one should have that kind of money. No one should worry about losing $100 million to taxes if they have billions of dollars. But it's such a pathetic life, you know, and they're impoverished spiritually. I don't know how you would keep from being impoverished spiritually if you had that kind of money, because you're not using it to serve other people.

00:23:21 Gary Commins

You're using it to make up for some sense of your inadequacy in other areas of your life. I guess if having so much money is so important to you, then you're kind of lost. I think another ancient concept of the common good has really kind of gone out the door that, you know, Aquinas talked about the common good, but Paul talks about it in the 13th chapter of.

00:23:44 Gary Commins

I think it's 13th chapter, but it's in First Corinthians. He talks about the common good, and a sense of the common good is really lost in our society and needs to be revived. It used to be there, sort of the idea of enlightened self interest used to be there, but that's really. It's just competitive and cutthroat and, you know, everybody for themselves, you know, And I think I told you that, you know, I'm the second oldest of my.

00:24:10 Gary Commins

There's four of us brothers. And I used it when people would ask me, you know, where am I in order? I would say I'm the second oldest, but the most mature and the least competitive and the most humble, you know, would be my way of expressing it. But that's a joke, you know, and.

00:24:27 Gary Commins

But for a lot of our society, people are, you know, and some of it is a struggle and it's out of fear and anxiety. But ultimately, what matters in life is how many lives do you touch in a positive way, not how many, how much money do you have, how many, how many people, and how deeply are you touching them and being a resource for them or a companion on the way, that's what makes life worthwhile.

00:24:53 Gary Commins

And that's, you know, as a priest, not a deacon, but just so blessed by being a part of these faith communities where I always felt like I loved so many people. It wasn't about if they liked me or didn't like me. It's about how Many people can I care for. You know, who am I, who am I helping and how am I doing that or trying to.

00:25:13 Gary Commins

Because, of course, life's a mystery. It's hard to know sometimes if you're helping. But just that intent to serve others, I think is absolutely critical. And in our society, in which so much revolves around money and wealth and, you know, I understand security, it's different, but the accumulation of wealth, it's. It's really just a tragic way to.

00:25:35 Gary Commins

As Jesus would say, you can gain the whole world and lose your life. And a lot of people seem to be interested in that. And I don't think it gets us very far.

00:25:44 Natalie Thomas

Right. And you are right. It's 1 Corinthians 13, right. We are many members, but of the same body also in Romans, into this idea of collective belonging to one another. And James and. And I often talk about in our world, of course, manifested in very different ways, but how most persuasions of dominant culture, whether it's progressive or conservative, have lost this idea that we actually belong to one another and are responsible for one another and that the church is really supposed to be a place that exemplifies that and ideally can call the world back to an understanding that we are each other's keepers.

00:26:24 Natalie Thomas

And for parents in particular, I'm thinking about just the struggle to raise children not in a world that centers them and centers themselves as in centering both centers me as the parent, but also centers my child and to really from a young age, as you talked about at the very beginning, just as practices that offer them a chance to give back and yeah.

00:26:47 Natalie Thomas

To not focus on themselves but good conversation. We do need to wrap up because of time, but we know it's gonna continue another week. We have another week with you. And we're very grateful, Gary, for you. Grateful. Very, very grateful for my beloved spouse over there.

00:27:03 James Thomas

James, right back at you.

00:27:04 Natalie Thomas

Yes. My partner in ministry. And if you are looking for ways to stay in touch with Bedtime Chapel, if there is someone who you would like to suggest comes onto the podcast as a guest, if there's something you'd like us to talk about in the future, you can connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, over Gmail and on our website.

00:27:25 Natalie Thomas

And it's Bedtime Chapel for all the handles, for the URL and for bedtimechapelmail.com and we will be praying with you throughout the week.