Commons Church Podcast

Philippians 2
***
We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

Heb 1
***
We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

Ephesians 2:14-18
***
We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

John 1:1-14
***
We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

We have just through Easter and we are now in the season of Eastertide, the 50 day celebration of resurrection. And that’s lovely but I think for a lot of us that are steeped in the evangelical industrial complex our relationship with Easter can feel a little complicated.
Sure,  we love resurrection and we are glad Jesus died “for us” but sometimes there is this niggling feeling like it doesn’t quite add up.
God is the source of this beautiful story of triumph and life and all the different ways that this story takes root in us but why did it happen in the first place?
If resurrection was always the goal does that mean a death always had to happen and if that always had to happen, who gets credit, or perhaps better said, the blame for that death?

We all have a guilty musical pleasure. Admit it.
A band we return to as the soundtrack to some other season.
An album we replay because it.still. holds.up.
The song we blast in the car when it comes on — lyrics flowing freely, dance moves optional.
Because music stirs us, evokes emotion, forms memory, and helps us return to ourselves.
Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that, at times, early Christian authors seem to have drawn on the songs and poetry around them as they wrote. Pulling meaningful words, rhythm,
and melody together to inspire their reflection and theology.
And this is a fascinating idea — that musicality shaped Scripture, but also that it plays a role in what makes these words compelling today.
Join us as we explore this ancient playlist together!

Easter Sunday is here. Resurrection has come for us. Today we awake knowing that the story is not over. And it is a celebration!

But this is also our first Easter Sunday gathering together to worship in three years, and we are ecstatic.

The Christian faith is an Easter faith. That means it is ultimately a joyous and hopeful view of the universe. Christ
has triumphed over the enemies of life and love. Death, and sin, and isolation, and despair have been given an expiry date. Love, and hope, and mercy, and grace have been given fully guaranteed futures.

Celebrate with us this Resurrection Sunday.

Everything depends on Jesus, his dying and rising life. Everything.
With a clear sense of who Jesus is—God most clearly revealed to us—and a
clear focus on what he has done for us through the cross and resurrection, we live now with a hope and confidence that cannot be undone.
Holy Week is the time in the Christian calendar when we pay closest attention to this part of the story.
In the same way, that the gospels slow down during Jesus' last week, helping us to notice every meaning-filled moment: we should not rush too quickly today. This is how God reverses death into life, despair into hope, violence into peace. And it does not come easily.

John 9:1-7
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Jesus endlessly fascinates. There is not a single moment, word, or action in his life that is not pregnant with something more. 

There is a qualitative difference that is unmistakable about Jesus, though. John puts in simply, "In him was life and that life was the light of all people." (John 1:4) As John writes about Jesus, he knows that he is touching the infinite. He charmingly says that the world was too small to record what could be said about him. (John 21:25)

So, what to do? How to tell a story too big for pages? Well, John chooses for us seven representative moments, seven real and tangible, physical signs of how the eternal comes into our material world through Jesus. Water and wine, hunger and bread, blindness and sight, dead and alive, we learn that the life of Jesus is not removed from where we are, but deeply present if we can see. 

As we begin the movement toward Easter, we follow seven revealing moments in the life of Jesus in the real physicality of our human selves; John will show us who Jesus is: God's presence with us.