The Nexus Podcast

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

On Easter Sunday, we gather again to step into a very different kind of morning. If Good Friday asks us to stay with what feels lost, Easter invites us to consider what we might be missing even when it is right in front of us. With poetry, song, Scripture, and reflection, we will move into a story where recognition comes slowly, hope arrives strangely, and the world may be more alive than we first imagined.

This Good Friday,  we will make space for the weight of the story without rushing past it. Through Scripture, music, art, and reflection, we will linger with the cross as a place of sorrow, honesty, and difficult love. This is a service for anyone who knows that not everything can be fixed quickly, explained neatly, or tied up by the end.

Friends, we are about to enter Holy Week, and so, as we do, we’re turning to one of the most surprising exchanges at the cross. It is the dialogue between Jesus and two criminals also being executed beside him. I want to pair this moment with Andrea Mantegna’s painting Crucifixion (Louvre). There is something incredibly vivid, to me, about this painting. It kind of draws you into the scene as a spectator. If you have a chance to look at it before Sunday, which of the two criminals do you think is the “good thief?”

Of course, the teaching this week isn’t really about who deserves what. Rather, it’s about what people reach for when they’re almost out of time: the things we ask for, what we bargain for, what we fear most, and what we hope might still be possible. It’s about the strange ache behind the words remember me, and the startling way Jesus answers.