The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 53: “Understanding” the Holy Trinity

Icon of the Holy Trinity with the Hope Canteen Podcast logo

Can anyone really understand the Holy Trinity? Many people have fought and wrestled and argued over how to understand God through the many different ways that God is revealed in the Scriptures.

We approach this topic from two angles this week. First is the Gospel reading from John 3:1-17. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night to try and figure out what Jesus is all about. Jesus doesn’t give a direct answer. Instead, he talks about the Holy Spirit, and God’s only Son given for the love of the world.

A Long Struggle to Articulate the Nature of God Faithfully

From there, the church through time has extended and developed its understanding of the nature of God through prayerful study in community. You may have noticed that the word trinity doesn’t actually appear in this reading, nor indeed anywhere in the Bible. Jesus just talks about God, the Son, and the Spirit, but he doesn’t say anything about how they all relate. Are they the same? Are they different? That was left for the following generations to wrestle with.

So, we must turn to how Christians have articulated the one God as three ‘persons’ in the centuries that followed. This is the reason we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the great feast of the church that takes place this week.

Knowing God More Through Understanding the Holy Trinity

Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is just a dry, dusty intellectual exercise! Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity is the best way the Christian faith has found to capture the heart of a God who is both perfectly united and relationship-driven, willing to dive into the messiness of human existence. Paradoxically, the mystery of the Holy Trinity gives us the clearest possible picture of who God is, and who we are in relationship to God.

Please join us around the virtual table this week for this celebration of God as unity and trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 52: Pentecost and the Holy Spirit

A stained glass window depicting Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, with the Hope Canteen Podcast logo below

Pentecost* is one of the great feasts of the church. It celebrates the coming down of Holy Spirit on the first disciples. As a result, it sets the beginning of that great family of Christ we call the church.

Acts 2:1-21 describes the events of Pentecost. In this story the disciples are gathered together for a yearly Jewish agricultural feast. By this time in Jewish history, they had long been dispersed across the known world. Even so, those in the diaspora continued to return to Jerusalem for the feast days.

On this Pentecost, something profound happened. The room shook and there was the sound of wind. The disciples found they had tongues of fire on their heads, and they could suddenly speak other languages.  They cascaded out of the upper room, proclaiming with boldness the Good News of Jesus Christ.

The lead apostle, Peter, explains what is going on. This event indeed marks the beginning the fulfillment of all that the Scriptures had pointed to. God’s Holy Spirit would be poured out for everyone.

Join us around the virtual table this week as we talk about Pentecost and the work of the Holy Spirit, the expansiveness of the mission of Christ, and what it means to live in the breath of God.

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*For more on how the Pentecostal movement of the 20th Century relates to the feast of Pentecost, see Pentecostalism: The Holy Spirit and the Modern World.

The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 51: Ascension Day

a traditional icon depicting the Ascension of Jesus

In this week’s podcast, we are looking at the feast of the Ascension. Ascension Day is one of the more underrated of the feasts of the church marking events in the life of Jesus. Two passages tell the story: Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11.

Christians celebrate Ascension Day every year exactly 40 days after Easter, to echo the 40 days that Jesus stayed with his disciples after the Resurrection. During this time, he met with them, taught them, and opened their hearts to understand the Scriptures. Finally, the disciples witness him lifted up out of their sight as he returns to God.

Even though this feast doesn’t get as much attention as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, it is crucial to how we understand Jesus’ ministry of salvation. It is also the catalyst for the arrival of the Holy Spirit ten days later.

The Ascension marks the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, launching the church to take up the Jesus movement. Join us around the virtual table as we explore the joy-filled Ascension Day.

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The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 50: The Challenge of Love

The Hope Canteen Podcast logo in front of a picture of a heart-shaped opening in a rock by the sea

Today, we are looking at John 15:9-17, one of the core teachings for which Jesus is best known. It centers on the command to love one another, such that our lives reflect and display the love and life of God. This is not often easy; embracing the challenge of love stretches us at every turn.

The instruction to love one another resonates within and beyond the Christian faith. Jesus says to his first followers and us: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” He then goes on to elaborate that he no longer calls them servants, but friends. They are his friends if they love one another like he loves them.

This simple but profound teaching forms the heart of Jesus’ message and underlies everything he does. His love takes him all the way to the cross. Sharing and participating in that love in big and small ways shapes and challenges us more than anything else. Join us around the virtual table this week as we delve into the challenge of love.

What Does God Want from Us?

What does God want from us?

A Three-Part Series on the Human Heart as the Temple of God

  1. Introduction

One of my favourite stories in the Bible is when Samuel the prophet travels to Bethlehem to anoint the new king of Israel. He knows that the future king will come from the family of a man named Jesse. When Samuel arrives, he asks Jesse to bring his sons to him, one by one. When Samuel looks at Jesse’s eldest son, he sees a strong and tall man with a kingly appearance, so he naturally assumes that he is the future king of Israel. But God stops him short, telling Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16: 7)

God Looks at the Heart

This theme runs all through Scripture. God looks deeper, right into the human heart. In the Bible, the human heart is more than just the organ in your chest. It is a metaphor for your whole inner life: your thinking, feeling, and willing. In the heart, all of your loves and hates are born. It is your deepest self, the home of your desires, fears, and hopes. The heart is the seat of your deepest joys and, conversely, where you know the most crushing pain. This is why we talk about having a broken heart or feeling like our heart has been torn out of our chest. When God looks at you, God sees your heart.

God doesn’t actually see all of the things that the world sees: your titles, your wealth, your fame, or your resume. God sees where you are joyful and where you are suffering, where you have loved your neighbour, and where you have hurt your neighbour. God only cares about one thing deeply, and that is your heart. This is what it means to say that God loves you: your deepest self, who you really are where no one else can see. For God, it is not about being perfect; it is about being honest. It is about offering God your heart for God’s mercy to heal it.

Old map

Here Be Dragons

God knows that it is not easy, because the human heart is a confused and rocky terrain. While our hearts are capable of great love and joy, they are also capable of inflicting great pain. An early Christian saint described the heart as an apocalyptic arena. He writes:

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. There are rough and uneven roads; there are precipices; but there too is God, the angels, life and the Kingdom, light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and treasures of grace. All things are within it.

St. Macarius of Egypt (300-391)

The ultimate meaning of discipleship is this universal struggle of the human heart toward God and against sin. The way to win this struggle is to let God love you, knowing that God’s healing love is called mercy as well as grace. But this isn’t easy. Next week we will talk about how repentance is really the name for the struggle to let Christ dwell in your heart richly, loving you deeply and transforming your heart.

The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 46: Doubt and Faith

Doubt and Faith in the Story of Thomas

Episode 46: John 20:19-31

In today’s podcast, we turn to John 20:19-31 and one of the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus. This story centers on one of the apostles, Thomas the Twin, who is sometimes called Doubting Thomas.

It begins a week earlier, when Jesus appears to the disciples, showing them that he is alive. However, Thomas is not present and has to hear about it from the others. When they tell him that they have seen Jesus, he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Then one week later, Jesus comes again, and this time Thomas is there. Jesus does exactly as Thomas asked and shows him his hands and his side. Seeing this, Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God.”

This story is one of the most relevant to us today, because following Jesus means giving our lives to someone we have not met in the flesh. That the Bible addresses doubt and faith so soon after the Resurrection tells us how important this topic is.

Join us around the virtual table as we talk about what it means to believe, how doubt can lead us deeper into faith, and how Jesus empowers us to follow him.

The Hope Canteen Podcast, Episode 42: For God so Loved the World

Podcast #42: For God So Loved the World
Episode 42: John 3:14-21

In today’s podcast we are looking at a passage from the Gospel of John that contains perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.

The passage flows out of a conversation between Jesus and a religious leader named Nicodemus. Our topic for the podcast today comes from this longer passage, John 3:14-21. It hangs on an important question: how to we know heavenly things? And more specifically, how do we attain to eternal life? The answer of the passage is through Jesus.

To help us understand it, the speaker points us back to a much earlier episode in Israelite history. It is a story where, centuries earlier, people were being bitten by poisonous snakes and getting sick. Moses was instructed to put an image of a snake on a pole. Then, if the Israelites looked at it, they would be healed. By referring back to this story, the Gospel of John is telling us that if we look to Jesus and believe in him, we too will be spiritually healed and receive eternal life.

Join us around the virtual table as we talk about what “God so loved the world” has to say about condemnation and love, staying close to God, and what it really means to believe.

In Search of the Good Life (Six Questions for Every Christian to Ask: Introduction)

In Search of the Good Life

Discipleship is such a churchy word. Why should we bother with it? Before I tell you why I think it is important, I want to tell you why I became a priest. This story contains what I love about discipleship.

Once upon a time, I was going to be an academic. I know that won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but the reason was that I loved the big questions of life: Who am I? What is my purpose? What does it mean to be a good person? I was in a graduate program in philosophy. My goal was to be a teacher, but for me this was less about sharing knowledge and more about being a life coach. I was after the concept of THE GOOD LIFE, a life lived well. Often the culture will give us a vision of the good life as sipping champagne, driving our Porsche, and not having to work.

But studying philosophy challenged that for me. I found that what we often call the good life is really the pleasant life. Beneath the glittering surface, it is the shallow life. Once one starts to look deeper, one finds that being so self-centered is really destructive. Philosophy’s answer is that if you want to get to your deathbed with no regrets, you need virtues and values such as responsibility and purpose; tempering the appetites; having a mission in the world, and so on. I got such joy out of pursuing these virtues that I wanted to share the good news of a life lived well. Then I met Jesus, and he changed everything. Well, sort of changed everything.

In Search of a Jesus-Shaped Good Life

My excitement and vision were still the same. I still wanted to encourage people to live deeper life, and to build their lives around higher virtues and values. But now all these virtues and values were Jesus-shaped. When I read the Gospels, I found that Jesus was doing this with the people that came to him. They heard his teachings and were profoundly impacted. As they stayed to hear more, they also started to observe how he lived, how he treated other people, how he prayed to God. They became his students, not in the sense of enrolling in a class, but in learning and imitating. They became students of wisdom and life. The fancy word for student is disciple.

When I put my first love of philosophy with my greater love of Jesus, I found that something providential happened. Jesus leads us into the true GOOD LIFE. It is also a life well-lived, but centered now on God and God’s plan for our lives. It is powered not by willpower, but by grace, and ends in a heart of love.

Living Well

This means different things to different people. But when I think of it, I often remember one of the funerals that impacted me the most. It was for a woman whom I had not met. When I started at my first parish as a new priest, she had already been sick with extreme dementia for quite some time. But I got to know her husband well. When she finally died, I led the funeral.

When her four children got up and spoke about their mom, it was the most moving testimony about a human being that I have ever heard. She had not lived publicly in the limelight. Instead, she focused on her family and volunteer work. But the love and grace she had given to her family and friends was remarkable. As I sat there, I remember thinking that if my children spoke like that about me when I died, then I would have lived well. I would have led a good life. So I prayed to God that I would be the person my children could speak about like that.

Becoming that person is not quick or easy. It is made up of small decisions and actions over the course of years, and the process is what we call discipleship. My invitation to you is also to strive to be the person that God has made you to be. Be a disciple.