Liturgy: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-16

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Um, so we are theoretically tonight in first Thessalonians chapter two, by the way, I like to start is just by saying that and coming here tonight, there are three things, um, that you and I are going to get engaged with and you and I are going to experience. And they're intentional things and they're things that we're, we need to experience. And one of them is encouragement. The purpose of being here this evening is to be encouraged. And when we say encouragement, when we use that word literally means to give somebody courage by calling them out by me saying, Hey Keith, come over here. Let me tell you something like giving him courage. It's, it's seeing someone in need and actually calling them to yourself to give them courage. The other thing that, that you should receive an offer in this community, um, is comfort. And comfort is not a play a way of calling people, but comfort is a way of going to someone who is in need. So it's, it's seeing someone in need or being the person that need and having someone come alongside you and comfort you in your wrestling. And in your struggling. The other thing that as you come and you practice and you participate in the community on a Sunday evening, that you should embrace and, and experience is an urging or an exhorting or a challenging to live a life that's worthy of God. These the three things, comfort and encouragement and an and an exhorting or an urging to live in the way of God is the reason that you and I come here now tonight what I want to discuss and it's gonna I'm gonna, I don't do this very often, but I'm going to kind of hijack the scriptures for what I want to talk about. Um, I rarely do that, but tonight you're going to have to give me some freedom in that. Um, you might be saying, Oh, you do that more than you think, Eric, but, uh, I'm going to do it purposely this time. Um, so we're in first Thessalonians and I want to just read to you a little bit of a text now just to kind of give you a context of it. Paul is talking to the festival and I can church and he's, it's kind of talking about how the gospel came to them. Okay. And in it he offers a nugget, and this is the way Paul works is he's talking about life and how he's been involved with the church and the suffering and the struggle they went through. And then in, um, in chapter two verse 11, he says at the very end of this referring to God, he says, God, who calls you into his kingdom and his glory into his kingdom and his glory. You and I spent a week out in the culture and we practice a lot of rituals and we actually practice a lot of liturgies. Now, liturgy is a way of collectively worshiping something or engaging in practices that honor an idea or something. And we do this all the time. We do this. When we go to shopping malls, we do this as we sit before our TVs, there are always messages and things that are being communicated to us and it changes our heart. And it pulls us away from things that are good and important. And when you and I come here in the evening every Sunday, and this is why I believe this is important and this actual process that we go through of worshiping and practicing together is that it? The practice of what we do here changes our heart. It moves our heart, it recalibrates our heart and what it does is it reconnects us to this phrase that you and I are called into the kingdom and into the glory of God, but called into the kingdom and into the glory and this, when we come and practice worshiping together, we're reminded of that. We're reconnected to that. Now, to be called into the kingdom means two things. It's, it's a certain way of living and it's a certain way of being. It's an identity and a way of living. That identity, right? First Peter two tells us that you and I are Royal priesthood, a Holy nation. When we come here and practice together, we practice that identity and we think about how we're to live that out and when we're called into God's glory, glory is a word that you and I don't use a lot. Neither is kingdom really. But glory just means weight. It's a weight of somebody. You've felt this, you know, everybody has kind of their own quote unquote aura, their weight. Well, the thing that it's, it's the, the way of having relationship with them. And so when we're called into God's glory, it's reminding us that our primary intimacy in life is God. The place where meaning is and relationship happens is with God. That's where all substance and meaning is in God's glory. He's offering us intimacy. So the way we practice every Sunday is something that recalibrates us back into the kingdom and back into relationship with God. And we do that by following a particular liturgy, a particular way of worshiping God. And our whole liturgy here at the village, starting from the beginning, offers you encouragement and calls you into encouraging it, offers you, it should offer you comfort in challenges you to comfort and hopefully it exhorts you to live a life worthy of God. And so our liturgy at the village starts with you getting in your car because most of you, I know all of us, we go to church at five o'clock in the evening. That means unlike many of our brothers and sisters, we didn't get up in the morning. I actually heard rumor that one of you spent all day in bed today, right? So we, we all, we have this opportunity to rest and relax. So there's actually a contemplation about coming to church in the evening and getting into the car, right? And the thing that we talk about at the village is Hebrews 10 24 right? Then we always tack on 25 but Hebrews 10 24 the writer of Hebrews says that you and I need to consider one another and how we might spur each other onto love and good deeds. Our liturgy at the village begins with you stepping in the car and remembering that the motto of the village is Hebrews 10 24 that it's actually not about you, that it's a process of you coming with a consideration of everyone here. And your purpose is to consider how you might spur or irritate them onto love and good deeds, which means how you might encourage them, comfort them, and urge them to live a life that is worthy of God. So you get in your car and you arrive here at the village, and most of you arrive at five 20 right? Some of you arrive at four 55 we officially start at five 10 right? That's, and we try to get the band up there. Now something happens though, you'll notice between four 55 and five 10 at the village is that the kitchen starts to fill up and it starts to fill up and people are talking and the kids go out and they play. Now, if you go to Romans 16 you'll see another places that Paul says that we used to greet each other with a Holy kiss at the very beginning of our service is what we would call the Holy kiss time. And here's why Holy kissed. I'm out and saying, we're all gonna make out. So relax. But it isn't. It is the beginning of intimacy. And here's why it's very important in the early church because slaves did not kiss their masters, right? You only would welcome someone and kiss them on the cheek and say, welcome. Who was not the same status as you were? But in the church, you walk through that door and everything changed. Different stratas were kissing each other right now by 300 a D it got really messed up and they outlawed the Holy kiss because they had the Holy kiss line and it just kinda got abused. But anyway, but in the early church, it was a point of intimacy, but not only was it a point of intimacy, it's, you know, you kiss somebody, you smell their breath. This is an intimate kind of experience. You're saying we're part of each other. And a lot of ways that first 10 minutes you walk in and we have no greeters. There's a, sometimes people walk right on by you and don't greet you. Sometimes everybody's like, Oh, it's good to see you. Like it's just the family. It's the Holy kiss time of the village. Right? And if you might have noticed that at five Oh five now the band gets up there and starts singing hymns kind of in a way of just sort of saying let's, let's kind of set the tone in the living room while everybody else is wandering around. All right. To begin this process of encouraging, comforting and challenging. So I want to, I just want to read a little bit more of this text for you as we kind of walk our way through. Um, but if we jump up to verse seven, for those of you who are falling around with me, Paul is in this place of just talking about how he's engaged them, how the gospel has engaged them. And he says that he talks about how he enters into relationship with them. He says, instead, we were like young children among you. Some places say gentle children just as a nurse, nursing mother cares for her children. So we care for you because we love you so much. We were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our Vives as well. One of the things about our community, and I think this, it kind of is the reason that we have a living room and the kitchen and everything is centered where it is, is because this is a family and you're walking in to a family worship and you're going to have kids running all over the place and you're going to have crying and you're going to, there's a bit of chaos. And at five 10 when the music starts, it's loud music, right? It's and shakers are handed out and part of our liturgy is shaking the shakers, right? So if the shakers aren't handed out, you should have a kid hand the shakers out because it's part of our liturgy. It's part of being part of the community. Now in Psalm one 50 David says, we're to make a loud noise. We're supposed to clash symbols in our praising of God, which is to make noise. Now we do that for that first song. And then if you're here, if you're not, if you're not usually late, you would notice that Ron will get up here and fiddle with the mic. Right? Cause he can't see it or he can't figure out how to turn it on or the 12 volt is burned out. Well, I love the way the Paul illustrates store to the family here and talks about how he engaged them as mother and as child because part of rod standing up here is calling everybody to the dinner table. Now my house, usually most of the time when we eat dinner, it's like nine people and more often than not a bunch of kids too. So getting everybody to the dinner table is actually difficult, right? You had to go door to door and tell them dinner's ready. You got to go outside and tell the kids, dinner's ready. When rock comes up, hearing gives this nice long busing. It's called a call to worship. It's called a call to dinner, right? It's getting so it's, it's still noisy and the music is still noisy, but it's, we're all being ushered in from the different areas. You'll notice that I'll go out there and yell at the kids to come in. We're all being ushered in to eat dinner together. It's, it's setting the table. It's an intimacy. It's an invitation into being encouraged, comforted, and exhorted and part of rod standing up here and calling you to the dinner table is finally saying, okay everybody, it's time to sit down and eat. Get your drink, sit down, let's eat. Let's begin this process. It's an exhortation. So we finished those songs and everybody sits down and you'll notice that we pray and that Sue asks, whoever's leading worship asked you to stand. There's a reason for that. Part of us standing during those two songs is to say we're honoring this process of coming and sitting there, coming and worshiping together. We're honoring being called to the dinner table and then we call these little kids up and it's interesting about calling all the little kids up is this is actually a sacred space, right? This is the space that I stand. That's where communion is. This is where you're all focused. This is sacred, and one of the reasons we call them up, it's not for a little kid's sermon. We're calling them up here in a lot of ways to say there is no sacred space. Jesus is very clear in the new Testament, the children should not be inhibited. They should be welcomed to him. So part of them coming up here, part of them being noisy, part of them telling me about the red ball marble game is saying no, your conversation and your purpose, that's, that's important. Your important. We don't need to shut you up. This doesn't all have to be about, you know, special spiritual words to say no, everybody is welcome here. The little kids have voice. It's important part. It's a demonstration to a lot of us who didn't have an opportunity to have voices kids. Part of this is supposed to be a healing process for you to watch and see. The kids have a voice and the thing that they discuss is a creed, right? They discuss the creed and the Lord's prayer and

Speaker 2: 14:47

Mmm,

Speaker 1: 14:47

here's the thing I say about the creed and about the Lord's prayer that I want you to kind of reflect on because a lot of times what we wrestle with this people is how come there are so many different kinds of denominations and why are people all over the place and why is Christianity seems so odd and nobody can agree on anything. What, what the creed is is the basic stats of the faith. It is a creed about me would be, okay, well Eric is this tall and he weighs this much and his eyes are this color and his education is this so that when somebody talks about me and they say, man, Eric is like maybe five, two and 120 pounds, you're like, you're not talking to Eric. Right? And that's very key that what we're saying when we have the kids recite the creed every other week and we recite it with them as we're saying, this is how tall our faith is. This is what, this is the basics that we don't argue about and we can all hook onto that. But you know what? A lot of you have different experiences of me. Some of you think I'm mean, so if you think I'm awesome, so if you think I'm weird, some of you think I'm intimidating. Some of you think I don't ever know what he's talking about, right? You have all of you have different experiences of me, but there are some basic facts that you can agree about about me, right? Then I'm 120 pounds in five too, right? But no, these are things that you can all agree on. That's why we saved them over and over it. Cause we're not only honoring that, that there are a set of beliefs that we all can agree on. We're also honoring that we experience God differently, right? That we have a different experience of God and we're saying that together. But it's the same with the Lord's prayer. It's really interesting about the Lord's prayer is that it doesn't say, well, when the disciples ask how to pray, he doesn't say, say my father, he says, say our father. That prayer becomes this communal thing. It's another thing that you can anchor into. It's another thing that you can say, okay, this is the way to pray and we all pray very differently. But if you walk away from our father, right, how will it be thy name? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Like when you move away from honoring God as father and as the one who rules, if you make it about you and your prayer is constantly about you, you're drifting away from the way you're the prey. If you begin to spend all your time with God, worrying about what you should be doing in life, then you're drifting away from the structure of praying that Jesus has given you of beseeching him for the moment and leaving the future to some, some other tomorrow and tomorrow's prayers. So it anchors you in something, it gives you something to anchor in. So when we're done saying the creeds, we do announcements and I don't know how many of you sit around the table and eat, but a lot of times we do that. That's where family announcements happen, right? That's where the dad, or in our house, because we live in a community house, maybe the two dads or the moms talk about the way things should be and there's a discussion about the way things should be and decisions that get made at the table hardly ever enforced. I mean like maybe one third of all decisions made at the dinner table actually get enforced, but lots of good ideas and decisions are made, right? And that's often how the announcements are at the village, right? That's how they often are. But I do want to stop and say that part of our liturgy, that's very important. Part of the thing we practice as a community is not just sitting in here, it's taking out those kids and spending time with them. It's in their different age groups. And I wanna, I wanna walk this backwards. We send out nine to 12 year olds every other week and now they just reflect on the previous sermon and somebody goes and sits with them, but half of that time they spend it in here with you and they're bored out of their minds and that's good. It's good for them to see this. It's good for them to experience it, and it's good for them to be bored, right? We try to help them with that, but no, they need to be bored and they need to experience this. Okay? We don't by any means hope that we're going to teach your kids a whole bunch about Jesus in there. We hope that Jesus has demonstrated, we hope that Jesus is modeled, but as a parent, it's our job to train you to train your children, and it's our job to try to shore up, but more importantly, the reason that we call you to go back there, even though you might just spend an hour chasing kids around and think, I don't even know what they do back there, and you're afraid that they're going to lock you in one of the rooms. That's a good thing. Here's why it's a good thing. There's this problem that the church is wrestling with and they're there. They're there articles and articles about this and it's millennials are leaving the church. They're leaving the church in droves. They're not going to church. What's going on? Only there's a problem. When you begin to look at the data, they're not leaving in droves. They're only living big churches in droves. What the data is saying, and it's been saying this for a long time, is that children who grow up in small churches and who can name multiple adults outside of their parents as spiritual connections and they call it a spiritual circle, stay at church, stay with Jesus and go on in the community, in ministry and in different expressions of faith. What I love about this church is that my daughter and my son, and I'll tell you, you can ask them, there's like 10 to 15 of you that they would be happy to plop down and tell you all about their life and tell you about their struggle with God and their pastor's kids and tell you if they don't agree everything with their dad and they have and they're okay with it and they feel really safe and they're not the only kids who can do that. And part of that is not because we had a miracle, amazing kids, vespers or kids program. It's because you guys over a long period of time said, I will be committed to go back there and spend time and offer relationship. You see, because the importance of the liturgy for our children is that you come alongside them as they grow up and encourage them and comfort them and challenge them to walk in a way that is worthy of God together as a community, a lot of times with three to eight year olds, that means you're just chasing them while losing parts of your hair. Right. But enjoying it or learning that maybe you don't want to have children or that you want more children. There's a lot of things to do for you to learn in our liturgy by doing nursery and kid vespers and all those kinds of things. But I, I, it's important. It's not just the, Oh my goodness, it's a thing. The changes our community and it's going to change the world. You simply volunteering. It's important. It's part of our liturgy. It's transformative. Now, the next part of our liturgy is me talking. Sometimes it's a monologue or rod talking and one of the elders, or sometimes it's a dialogue. Sometimes Michael comes up here and tells you what I said wrong. Um, but usually it's some kind of conversation. And that conversation is around scripture. And in a lot of ways, this is what I would call the spot where the fathering happens in our community. And Paul says in[inaudible] verse 11 here that he entered into community with them and he tells them he, he acted like a father. And I love this because it tells us exactly what a father is and I, and it's kind of the three things that I used earlier, but he says, for you know that we dealt with each of you as a father, deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory. This is the part where you get challenged to encourage, to comfort, and to live a life that's worthy of God. And what's interesting about it all is that we use scripture, but at the village, we don't make a lot of statements about scripture in the sense that we're not going to argue over in errancy. We're not going to argue. For those of you who don't know what that means, don't worry about it. We're not gonna argue about should we or shouldn't we read the Bible? We're a Christian Church. The only place to know about God is the Bible, right? There's a few other things, but this is where the text is. It would be silly for us to argue about the Bible. This is our text. This is the place that God has expressed. And in second Timothy three 16 Paul says this about scripture. All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. What we say is scripture is the authoritative community member. It's the member that says, Hey, this is what the kingdom's like. Hey, this is what the glory of God is like. Now wrestle with it. It should make you uncomfortable. It will rebuke you. It will encourage you in the right direction. It will make you squirm, it will frustrate you. But at the village we say, no, no, but we want to wrestle with it. We're not going to smack each other over the head with it. We're gonna wrestle with it. We're going to say, you know what? This is where God has chosen to reveal himself. So we're going to wrestle. And so we talk about it every single week and you guys ask questions. And the one of the reasons that I say that this is like the fathering and one of the ways you can see encouragement and comforting and and urging happen in our community is I will preach and then a lot of you will have heard one little phrase that I spoke and the conversation will be all about that little phrase and I'll be like, Hey, that's not what my sermon was about. But everybody will be talking about that. And then one of the wise or old people or young people will say something and then everyone will shake their head and be like, yeah, right. Why didn't Eric say that? Right? And there's a fathering. It's the way the spirit of God fathers, us and encourages us and moves us in the direction that we need to go. The voice of the community with the spirit inspiring us, encourages us, comfort us, and urges us in that direction. When the message is done and we pray there, there's a whole set of ways to respond and each one of these ways and offers us some form of encouragement, some form of comfort and some form of urging and the direction we need to go. The first one, we always say that giving, we just say, Hey, if you belong to this community, you should give. Now, one of the purposes of all this is that you're responding to scripture and what you should hear in the message is that Jesus died for you and that he Rose again from the dead and that you need him and he poured himself out for you and giving as a response to that, right? That you and I give because you want me to preach. You want this family to be here every Sunday. You want to be able to wrestle with it and interact with it so you give so that it's present so that you can be comforted and encouraged and challenged and you can wrestle with your own brokenness. So we say GIF. Then we say over there, you can sit in the healing chair. Now that chair used to be the sinner's chair. It was black and had the seven deadly sins for 11 years. And we said, go sit in the sinner's chair and people would sit in it. That was brave, I think to go sit in that and be prayed for. But a while back, maybe three years ago, four years ago, he said, you know what we've been saying as a community, that the village is about healing the city. One person at a time, we should have a chair that says, this is where you can sit and proclaim that you need healing. So now we say one of the ways that you can respond to God's word, one of the ways that you can say I need comfort is to go sit in that chair and to say, I need comfort. I need healing and body, soul, and mind. I need this. It's, it's a place of vulnerability. You can still profess or confess your sin, but it's a place of vulnerability. It's a place to be comforted.

Speaker 3: 27:55

Okay.

Speaker 1: 27:57

And then we come to communion. I can preach a whole long sermon on communion, but let me just, for some of you, you grew up in church and maybe you have lots of different church experiences and so communion has lots of different messages to it. And for others of you, you never got to take communion as you were growing up. It was new to you. But for me, communion was, I was constantly told that I needed to make sure I had no sin in my life before I took communion. I needed to examine myself. And there were long times of music for me to look inside and see if there's any sin that I could remember and to purify myself because there are scriptures that say that I can eat condemnation on myself. And so I was terrified to take communion. I was afraid that somehow God would find a sin that I didn't know about and then I would be condemned, but he didn't know I was going to be condemned. And it got complicated. But the reality is is that communion is for people like me who are condemned, who are messed up when I come to communion. And I take the bread, which is God's body broken, and I take the wine, which is God's body poured out, Jesus, his body, his blood poured out for me. I take it as someone who broken and I take it as someone who's in need. So when you go read scriptures that talk about condemnation, if you take it in properly, here's how you take communion improperly. You come and you look at the bread and you say, I don't need this, and then you eat it and you drink the wine. You say, I don't need this. That's how you take it in properly. You take it with content and you regard it as useless and pointless, but you still it in response to the cross and to the resurrection, the call for you to come up and take communion. It is a place of being urged to live a life worthy of God because when you take the bread and you dip it in the wine and you eat it, what you should hear is the words that Jesus offers the woman who is cotton on the adultery. Where are your accusers? Go and sin no more. When I stand up here with the bread and the wine, I remember that I have no accusers. And there's a challenge for me to live with and not sin. It's a response. It's a place of being urged to live a life worthy of God. It's a fathering aspect of our liturgy. Now you'll notice that there's meditation music, which is just quiet music that plays, that lets the band take communion because they want them to be part. But it also says that this is a no shaker time for you middle schoolers. It means that we've changed the tone of the music and that it's a time of reflection and response and we start to sing and the singing is important. Now, we were a lovely family and we get up and move around a lot and that's awesome. And you should get coffee and you should move around, but you should not forget that the singing is a response. And you know, I heard a theologian would say that singing as praying twice. And Bano says the greatest worship leader ever, right? Says the Bano. Yeah. Clever YouTube for you, old people. Um, which I, I mean anyway. Yeah, yeah. I know most of you hopefully know who Bondo is. Anyway, he says that he stopped singing political music a long time ago and he said this like 10 years ago or 15 years ago because it has no impact. It doesn't change anybody. He said he starts stinking singing about human experience because when you sing about human experience and you sing about what is true, it breaks through people's barrier and it transforms them. The thing, the hand that they hold up, if you're not telling them how they should live their life and posing your way of being, but allow the music to transform them. Now at the village, the music is, yes, very different. It's in minor keys. It's written by mostly villagers and it's not the music that you would find in other communities that worship Jesus. And it's not that there's a judgment on them, but there is something about us as people in this time period where we like to sing songs about us and our experience. And so you might notice that the village with the music isn't about us or our experience. In fact, if you grow up at the village, I can just tell you passages of scripture and you'll be, Oh yeah, that song, that song you didn't go. Romans 12 first Peter two Proverbs three five and six we can, Jeremiah 19 we can go on and on. Isaiah 55 our scripture is the text. Our songs are the text put put on us over and over again to transform our hearts because we struggled to read scripture. So part of it is we need to pray it and sing it together as a community. All of these things are built in to recalibrate your heart into the kingdom and into the glory because we're constantly being recalibrated out of it as soon as we step out the door. So it's important for you to hunker down in that music, to listen to it, to sing it, to hold onto it as a service goes along that last song, people go get their kids, the kids come in. It's allowed song, there's shakers and then there are two events that happen after that that are really important. One event is the one we're done. We sing happy birthday. And you might not think that happy birthday is important, but it is actually one of the most important parts of our liturgy because in a culture where that says you are not really that important and it is all about you. We save for a few moments, even though you have to bring us dessert, that you are worth celebrating and that there is in a small moment a picture of what Jesus is doing constantly over you. He knit you together, he created you, he loves you, and he sings you happy birthday all the time and that moment, and I love it because anybody you don't even have to belong to, but you can come out, you know, if you brought us dessert or you can jump onto somebody else's dessert, you can get up here to have happy birthday sung to you because it's that moment when you're important. And you know what? Adult people who've like been in this church for a long time. I'm like, really? You're going to have happy birthday again? Awesome. Like now it's like I kids, I love it. I like to get up here. But it's surprising to me how much you guys love to have people think for you. But you know what? Cause it's a taste of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is celebrating you and it's a huge part of it and I love to see the kids just enjoy it and treasure it and want to be up here and want to make sure everybody else gets up here. The other part, the next part is rod, right? Most often, because he has the deep voice. He comes up here to bless us and he blesses us and he speaks this, this co, this basically descending over us. And really what he's saying is you've come here and you've been recalibrated. You've been encouraged, you've been comforted and you've been urged to live in a way that is of God. Now you need to take this liturgy and you need to go out. But he also puts a blessing over you. And he does that in the way of the apostles. When Jesus in the new Testament tells his disciples what you bind on earth, I will bind in heaven. Rod is binding a blessing over you to go out into the world and bring this liturgy to bear on people, the celebration, the comfort, the urging and the encouragement onto them. So take that seriously as close to magic as it gets. That's magic. He is putting a blessing on you and blessings go into time. He's proclaiming it over you. So take hold of that and go out and offer it. There's one last thing that happens in our liturgy and it's really important and Aaron is working our heinie off over there to put together a awesome white chicken chili for you guys to eat. And there is something really powerful about eating because you know when you and I eat, we need the well, most of us don't. But we do need food to sustain us. And what food reminds us is that we're all the same. We all need food, we all need food to survive. And so when we sit across from one another, we are confronted with a lot of different things. We're confronted with maybe the chaos of our neighbor and that they're trying to hold down two kids and feed them and talk to you about the intimate parts of your life as they feed their kids or you. You know what? When a bunch of people are eating and you're sitting by yourself, you can have two experiences. One, it can be super lonely and you can become more in touch with your loneliness than ever as you sit there and eat and no one eats with you. That's a powerful part of our liturgy to understand that even though it, this is a good community, it's not a perfect community, it's a broken community and it's a community that's utterly disappointing and that's a moment in our liturgy for you to look around and say, Oh, I don't fit over there. It should feel a little lonely and reminds you

Speaker 4: 37:49

[inaudible]

Speaker 1: 37:50

it's not perfect. The only place you're going to find fulfillment is in Jesus. Part of how our liturgy reminds you of that. But the other way, you may not get to sit with people all week and this is the time when you sit with adults and talk to adults and feel like you have a normal conversation, right? This is a place where you can talk about all the things that have happened in the week. That's how our literacy works now. We opened Thessaloniki, eons up with the introduction that says that the first one I can churches in God, the father and in Christ, and then he says grace and peace. And the thing that I told you was that you and I are part of a kingdom, the Zinn, God and in Christ and the jewels that we hold on to our grace and peace. The problem is that when you and I carry those jewels out into the world, the world tells us that the good life is not found in Jesus. The world tells us that the good life is found in a whole bunch of other things that we don't have and that we need and grace and peace begin to erode. And the reason that you need Sunday more than you need anything else more than you need your private quiet time and your private closet and your little small group that speaks deeply and intimately into your life. The reason you need Sunday is Sunday is the time when you practice with your community. The restoring of the grace of God, uh, reconnecting to his mercy and the peace of God, the reconnecting to his deliverance so that you can walk into the world and offer blessing. I'm not saying all the other things aren't important, but I am saying that this is the place that recalibrates you. And I wouldn't take it lightly because it is us. Like when Paul talks about an obstruction, this passage he talks about, he came as a mother, he came as a child, he came as a father. Well, that's what our liturgy offers us. It is our mother. It is our child. It is our father. We participated in together and it's transformative. And I ending right at perfect time. So.