The Nexus Podcast

I was thinking this week about all the people in my life that I feel comfortable and familiar around. I am deeply grateful for these people, and I am sure you can relate. I hope all of us have people in our life that are just easy and relaxing to be around. The trouble is, every time I open the gospels, I find myself unsettled by the company Jesus kept. For some reason, I can’t imagine being comfortable around many of them, and that is what I want to explore this Sunday as we begin to bring this The Art of Reading a Strange Book series to a close. Consider Matthew 9 alone. In this chapter, Jesus keeps stepping across lines of comfort. He heals people others avoid and sits down to eat with the kind of people respectable company would rather skip. It has me wondering, am I missing out on something with my instinct to stay around the people most comfortable to me? Jesus' table just always seemed to keep getting bigger, while, if I am being honest with myself, the older I get, the smaller my table seems to become. Anyway, I want to have some fun while exploring these ideas and questions, so I have a few things planned that I hope will grab our attention while allowing us to see something we might be missing about love. 

Friends, this Sunday I want to give you a parabolic sermon about idolatry, and it begins off the coast of New Zealand. Fifty years ago, conservationists began an ambitious project to restore a small island and bring back some of the wildlife it had lost. Their plan was unusual, painstaking, incredibly creative, and would take years of care. And so, they prepared the island, set their experiment in motion, and waited. What happened next is a story I can’t wait to share with you on Sunday. You see, last week, Karla introduced us to the biblical idea of idolatry. This Sunday, we’ll return to it and build on what she shared. Idolatry is one of Scripture’s oldest and most pressings concerns. But what if it is also a deeply human story about where we place our love, trust, and hope?

In the story of the golden calf (Exodus 32), the Israelites fashion an idol, making God furious. Every time I encountered this story in Sunday School, (which was frequently), I never understood why, since this was so egregious, it was so hard to avoid. Making a giant golden calf takes serious time and effort—surely someone could come to their senses and shut it down along the way! But look more closely at what the people were experiencing: they were freshly escaped from slavery, generationally traumatized, exhausted, and stranded in a harsh desert. They’d survived starvation and violent attacks, only for their leader, Moses, to disappear up a mountain for 40 days. Facing complete uncertainty, panic took hold: Are we abandoned? Will the food last? Who will attack us next? So they created something solid they could see and hold onto, to anchor their worship in something tangible. In context, it makes sense. It’s human, understandable, and rather easy to do. We naturally crave tangible security, and we tend to grip those things quite tightly. So what's the problem? Continuing on in the series The Art of Reading a Strange Book, this Sunday we’ll consider why the Bible might be so repetitively insistent on warning us away from idols. Besides great music and coffee, I hope we’ll enjoy a few cartoons and a clip from a TV show I’ve been wanting to share. We’ll celebrate the Eucharist and you are welcome to stay afterward to eat soup together. I hope we’ll feel encouraged when all is said and done.

Comedian Ricky Gervais poses a pointed challenge to people of faith: If God wants to prevent evil and suffering but can’t, what does that say about God? If God can prevent them but won’t, what does that say about God? And if God is able and willing to end them, why do they remain? These are tough questions, and they deserve a response. If you’ve been following along this fall, you know we’re learning the art of reading the Bible well. Genesis begins with a world God calls good, but just three chapters in, things take a sharp turn. So, inquiring minds want to know: how did the snake get into this good world? The Bible’s response is conspicuously silent, like a politician at a press scrum saying, “No comment.” For me, the problem of evil and suffering is the Bible’s weakest link. It’s also my spiritual obsessio, the question that haunts me most, and the one I keep returning to when I read the Bible and look at the world. I don’t have a tidy answer, and I’m not sure the Bible offers one. But I do think its story has something compelling to say about facing a broken world.

Hey folks, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. There’s plenty to be thankful for, even in these peculiar times. I’m not sure if your family does this, but every Thanksgiving my family goes around the table, and everyone names a few things they’re grateful for. Beyond the usual answers, I know one of my own will be you: the Nexus community. I’m truly thankful for you. If you’re around this Sunday, I hope you’ll join us as we continue exploring the art of learning to read the Bible well. This week, we’ll look at two biblical stories that shape how we understand salvation: the Day of Atonement and the Exodus. Reading them together invites us to see more than God as judge. Instead, taken together, these stories open up a richer picture of God as merciful and as the one who leads people toward freedom. We’ll begin with some different theological worlds before launching into the strange and memorable story of The Great Pear Tree Theft.

Friends, for the past few weeks, we have been happily hunkered down in the opening chapters of Genesis. At this pace, we should complete our journey through the Bible sometime around 2050. That isn’t going to work, so it is time to pick up the pace. This Sunday, we are going to take a soaring tour across Scripture (with stops in Isaiah, Ezra, Deuteronomy, Job, Joshua, Exodus, and Jonah). What I hope to help us explore is how the Bible is not a flat text that offers one simple answer to every question. Instead, it is a lively conversation across generations. Time and again, one biblical voice speaks, and then another voice complicates it, widens it, unsettles it, challenges it, even deconstructs it. And so, from questions about who belongs, to inter-religious marriage, to purity and justice, to suffering, violence, and the temperament of God, we will discover a Bible that talks back to itself, and, if we are listening, talks back to us. So, I hope you will join us we explore why the Bible is a wily text, clever enough to disrupt our need for quick, tidy answers, and too rich to stay flat.

  Friends, we are back at it again, and the word is that we will be back in Iona Hall this Sunday, which feels like great news! But, as we continue our journey of learning the art of reading Scripture well, I want to ask this Sunday what it is that connects a diamond ring, the Working Centre, and parents who wear pajamas to school drop-off? This Sunday, we are going to follow a surprising story from Dorothy Day into one of Scripture’s most familiar, and most demanding, assertions: that every person bears the image of God. Now, saying things like “all people are created equal” feels commonplace and obvious to us, but in a world constantly judging and ranking us, what exactly do we mean by that? Along the way, I will have a few little rants and petty grievances to share with you all, but it is all aimed at us considering an important question: can we recognize someone’s dignity when we don’t admire them, agree with them, or understand their life? From political loyalties to the suffering on our own downtown streets, we’ll explore what it takes to keep seeing the humanity in one another.

Friends, last week we stepped behind the plate to make some calls about the Bible’s strike zone. This Sunday, Genesis gets the umpire’s attention. What kind of pitch is its creation story? (I promise to end the baseball metaphors when the Jays finally end my misery). Anywho, beyond many of the science textbook distractions about the book, I am inclined to think Genesis is addressing a much older, and more urgent, question. What kind of world are we living in? As we explore that, we’ll encounter an ancient Babylonian sea monster, a carefully tended bonsai tree, a French existentialist, a couple of summer blockbusters, and one extraordinarily courageous prisoner at Auschwitz. There will be some lighter moments along the way, but also some headier terrain, and a bit of heaviness as we consider the costly love of a man named Maximilian Kolbe. So, what is really at stake in the opening chapters of Genesis? Perhaps much more than how or when the universe began. These ancient words may be making a daring claim about the deepest nature of reality and about the kind of people we are called to become within it.

Trying to be a person of faith is such a strange assignment, eh? Frederick Buechner once wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.” He certainly got that right. There is beauty everywhere, but also more than enough of the terrible to keep a person awake at night. How does one believe in a world like that? Well, this season at Nexus we’re exploring The Strange Art of Believing in a Terrible and Beautiful World, because, well, to practise faith these days requires some imagination, a little courage, and the willingness to admit that we’re still figuring it out. This Sunday, we begin with a sermon I am calling The Strike Zone, which is about how we stay in dialogue with that strange old book we call the Bible. We know that anyone can pick up a Bible and make some calls with it. Then again, anyone can pick up a reciprocating saw, and some of us really shouldn’t. How do we learn to handle Scripture well, especially when everyone seems so certain they’re reading it correctly? I want to explore all that and more this week. So, expect a questionable marriage experiment, a crash course in Bible safety, a nineteenth-century Scotsman stepping in as umpire, and a family reunion with a surprising reception. We’ll also consider why getting something wrong about the Bible can feel so frightening to us and why we might have more room to learn than we thought. And given that I'm all in on the Toronto Blue Jays right now, there will also be a whole lot of baseball metaphors, because the first thing to learn about the art of reading this book is how to call The Strike Zone. So, batter up! (yes, it felt as cheesy to write “batter up” as it probably did to read it, but I am going with it folks because of the baseball metaphors). - Brad Watson

Well, friends, just like that, we have arrived at our season finale. For our final Sunday together before the summer, I want to close with a question worth carrying over the next few months. When was the last time you experienced God? Not just thought about God, agreed with an idea about God, or heard someone else speak about God. I mean, sensed God’s nearness in some real way. I think for many of us, the experiential side of faith can feel complicated. We may be open to the Holy Spirit in theory, but many of us are not exactly charismatic in practice. And so, we may not have dramatic stories of wind, fire, prophecy, or tongues, but I imagine many of us still long to know that God is near. So, for this final Sunday, I am working off a hunch, and it is this: the experience of God is more common than we realize, but quieter than we expect. To explore that, I want to showcase five of the quieter windows through which the presence of God may become known to us. And with that, I can’t help but wonder if the invitation for us this summer is simply to open the windows, make room, and pay attention. Because sometimes, when the window is open, the wind comes.