The Nexus Podcast

Windows to the Wind (S16 Episode40)

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.

Into The Looking Glass: Anthropology (S16 Episode39)

This Sunday we’re doing something a little different:

Into the Looking Glass: Anthropology

Over the past several months, our Anthropology series has sparked conversations, questions, disagreements, insights, and more than a few stories. It’s been one of those series that seems to have stayed with people.

So rather than simply moving on, we’re taking one last look.

Join me (Sarah) as I walk us back through the series and revisit some of its biggest ideas: What are human beings really like? Are we limited, conflicted, and self-centred? What happens when anthropology meets relationships, politics, and faith? And what might grace have to do with all of it?

The best part: along the way, we'll hear reflections from a number of Nexus folks whose own stories, questions, and experiences were stirred up by the series. Some agreed. Some pushed back. Some found language for things they’d been wrestling with for years.

Whether you heard every sermon, missed a few, or are joining us for the first time, we think you'll find something worth reflecting on.

This Is Us (S16 Episode38)

Well folks, the end of our season is fast approaching, and so this Sunday represents a sort of epilogue to our anthropology series. Instead of bringing another teaching or abstract idea, I simply want to tell you a story that forces us to ask one of the oldest and most uncomfortable questions there is: what are human beings, really?

I want to tell you the devastating story behind one of J.M.W. Turner’s most haunting paintings. By it, we will look at how easily people can be reduced to labels, categories, or even cargo, and why the Jesus Path claim that every person bears the image of God is far more disruptive than we often realize. This will be a heavier morning, but not a hopeless one. So, as I close my part in this series, we’ll ask what it means to be people who can honestly look in the mirror while still trusting that the first word over humanity is image, and the final word is grace. 

The Spirit in Us - A Wild Goose Chase? (S16 Episode37)

n her well-known poem, “Wild Geese”, Mary Oliver says:

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

While we might be more familiar with the image of the Holy Spirit coming as a Dove, offering comfort and guidance, the Spirit can also be experienced as Celtic Christians describe - as a Wild Goose, startling us out of our comfort zones. Which image do you lean towards? If you’re not sure, consider how obvious things need to be to get your attention. Whether it’s in the world around you (like a literal sign, dishes to be done, someone needing help) or in your internal world (blind spots and motivations), how “loud” do things need to get for you to notice them? Do you need flashing lights on a billboard, or just a little nudge? And…is there a difference between what you want and what you need? 

This Sunday is Pentecost on the church calendar when the church remembers the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the disciples huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem. Some wild things happened that day, things that both disrupted and comforted, empowered and calmed those who were present. They were met in ways they had never been met before. 

We’ll take some time to look back and dig into that story in Acts 2, and make room to notice where that same Spirit might be at work in our lives even now. We’ll pick up where I left off last time, remembering our beginnings in Genesis 1 & 2 - Original Blessing - and see how that beginning informs our pneumatology - our understanding of the Holy Spirit (pneuma in Greek).

A Welcome for the Weary (S16 Episode36)

Well friends, this Sunday marks the final week of our anthropology series, and we’ll be wrapping it up by asking what happens when anthropology meets faith? Throughout this series, we’ve explored what it means to be human: limited, conflicted, self-centered, and deeply in need of mercy. But this final week brings that conversation into the life of faith itself. What if the goal of the Jesus Path is not to become the kind of person who needs less grace, but to become someone less afraid of needing grace in the first place?

As we close the series, we’ll return to Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” as a final way of reminding ourselves that the Jesus Path offers real humans incredibly good news.

Politics Without Salvation (S16 Episode35)

When it comes to anthropology, the rubber hits the road in both relationships and politics. This week, we tackle what happens when anthropology enters the political arena.

This won’t be easy, because our politics have a way of getting into the air we breathe. It shapes the news we consume, the conversations we avoid, the assumptions we make, and sometimes even the way we see the people sitting across the table from us. Disagreement can start to feel less like disagreement and more like danger. Before long, politics is no longer just helping us think about justice, policy, or the common good. It starts to quietly teach us who to trust, who to fear, and who to dismiss.

This Sunday, we continue our series by asking what the Jesus Path might offer in a polarized age. What happens when politics begins to function like a salvation story? What happens when our convictions become a ladder that lifts us above our neighbours? And what might it look like for a church to tell the truth, seek justice, confess its own limits, and still refuse to let contempt have the final word?

The Weight of Love (S16 Episode34)

This Sunday at Nexus, we continue our series on anthropology by asking what may be the most practical question of all: what do we expect from the people we love? Anthropology can sound abstract until you are married to someone, raising kids with someone, building friendships, joining a church community, or assembling a gazebo with your spouse and discovering that “marital harmony” apparently has a Rona assembly fee.

Much of relational life happens not only in what people do in relationships, but in the story we tell ourselves about why they did it. When people disappoint us, forget things, get defensive, act strangely, or fail to become the people we hoped they would be, what story do we tell? This week we will explore how a low anthropology may not make love less possible, but more honest, more merciful, and perhaps more able to carry the ordinary weight of real human relationships.

The Burden of Being Yourself (S16 Episode33)

Friends, this Sunday we keep moving through our anthropology series by asking a deceptively simple question: what if the "self" is not something to be found, but something to be formed?

As we start to explore the real-world implications of the anthropology we hold, I want to explore the tension between cultural aphorisms like “be yourself” and “you do you” with Jesus’ words “deny yourself.” Can you be yourself, or do you, while denying yourself? There is a tension here between the modern quest for authenticity and the strangely different path Jesus offers.

So, our anthropology journey continues with a look at the "self" and why it may be less coherent and stable than we often assume, and why that might actually be good news!

Along the way I want to explore the story of Peter denying Jesus, his dinner invitation to Zacchaeus, and why the movie Downhill (starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) might offer us a clue as to why performing the "self" can come to feel less like freedom, and more like a burden. So, this Sunday, we’ll consider the possibility that grace begins not when you finally find your truest self, but when you discover something better.

The Beautiful Order of Things (S16 Episode32)

Where we begin makes a big difference to our journey and to our future. We don’t pick up a book and begin at Chapter 3. Why would we do that with Scripture? The Bible begins the human story in beauty and goodness, but so often, our theology and the stories we tell ourselves tend to begin with our brokenness. We overindex on the negative. (Don’t mean to brag, but I am quite skilled at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...like everything went well, but I will find something to berate myself for, just in case I get any ideas...)

A negative theological starting point and focus impacts us in a wide variety of ways…imagine you receive an invitation to the world's greatest art gallery. You enter expectantly, but instead of being invited to take in the masterpieces, someone hands you a bucket of soap and a scrub brush and barks at you to start cleaning the floor tiles, saying you should be thankful to even be allowed inside. The orders meet your inner sense of shame and unworthiness, so you hit the floor and get to work. 

An unlikely scenario maybe, but many of us go through life as a cleaning crew, focused on the floor instead of the art. 

In a similar vein, there’s an old story about a giant clay Buddha statue in Thailand which was being moved. At some point during the move, it cracked. As the monks gazed in horror at the cracks, someone looked more closely. They saw something shining underneath the clay. Chipping away the mud, they discovered the clay had been covering a statue made of fine gold. Instead of enjoying and valuing the treasure we hold, cultivating the goodness we do find inside, many of us spend our lives trying to fix the cracks in our clay. What if we stopped trying to patch the mud and began to notice the gold - there since the very beginning?

This Sunday, let’s continue the journey, exploring the highs and lows of our anthropology, considering what happens when we start with beauty. We certainly cannot deny that we are cracked. But what happens when we consider that perhaps our cracks don’t just let the light in, they let it out?

Tilted Inwards (S16 Episode31)

Well, with Lent and Easter now behind us, we’re returning to our Anthropology series this Sunday after a six-week pause. I want to pick the series up again with one of the biggest questions beneath so much of life: what are human beings really like? What does it mean to be human, not just in theory or only when we are at our best, but in the ordinary realities of conflict, relationships, stress, hope, and the strange ways we make sense of ourselves.

This week, we move into a very revealing part of that conversation as we look at the third pillar of a low anthropology. To do that, we will need to talk about sport parents, why psychologists have identified 188 “biases” or “fallacies” humans are prone to fall into, and to my delight, Glenn Pascoe will also showcase for us an all too familiar flaw in ourselves. In the end though, I hope there may something unexpectedly clarifying, and even freeing, about telling the truth about ourselves a little more honestly.