Sermon was not recorded this week but transcript is available at the link below. Go to bottom of this introduction for link to the pdf file.

COVENANT SUNDAY

Today is Covenant Sunday at Cap. We are going to ask you to freely and voluntarily participate in making covenant with us. Our Capchurch covenant is value laden. The values behind the covenant express our common experience of being called by God; the content of our faith—what we believe about the triune God from the Bible; who we are as a community; our sense of purpose, mission; And our unique history with God.

Behind our covenant are other values—values that define who we are as a community of faith and how we will treat one another; values that the shape and character of church life. All of our ministries and programs; and our pastoral posture when we meet with you for coffee arise out of these values. By affirming these values we as leaders are writing Cap’s history in advance. Covenant is the highest form of relational commitment. It writes the future in advance by choosing to do good to someone despite what may come. When you define your relationships by covenant, they are defined by commitment, love, and acceptance and not by performance. Let’s make covenant!

Find the written transcript of the sermon
here

DON’T DO IT ALONE
Ephesians 2:11-22

Eugene Peterson writes, “As long as individualism has free reign in our lives, we will not be capable of embracing church. Individualism severely handicaps us in growing up to the measure of the full stature of Christ. If unchecked it can be fatal, fating us to lifelong immaturity.”

Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection

Last week we talked about God‟s will and community. I said, “You will not find meaning in your spiritual life by being a consumer . . . and you will actually inhibit the community from maturing. The thing about maturing is that you can‟t do it by yourself and you will never achieve maturity if you pursue it directly. Romans 12 makes it clear that spiritual maturity is a by-product of commitment to a community of faith and doing the hard, uncomfortable and relational stuff that happens when you are involved deeply with people.”
As a community hold onto what is good . . . Help one another with faith burn-out; and encourage one another to refuel with the Spirit as needed. Stand with one another in hard times and you who are not suffering don’t give up on prayer for those who don’t have the strength to pray. Your turn will come when they can stand with you.
[Romans 12:9ff]

What comes to mind when someone says “Let‘s celebrate?” Food? Party? How about if we add “let‘s celebrate Christ?” Most of us probably think celebrating Christ is worship and you‘d be right. Yet what the Bible thinks of as worship is different from what we think of as a worship service. There are many words in the Bible for celebrate–two show different aspects of celebration. Prospiptó from which we get prostrate is used in Luke 5:8 where Peter falls before Jesus in awe of the miraculous catch of fish. Part of celebrating Christ is to receive his overwhelming grace and respond with humility and awe.

Latreuó is found in Romans 12:1, Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Celebrating Christ according to the Bible is primarily about your lifestyle. Check the context for more specifics on a lifestyle that celebrates Christ. How you love, hate, handle affliction, have people for dinner, give are all acts of worship—or not. Today we examine the 2nd of Cap‘s three C‘s—called to celebrate Christ.

All families have rules. All relationship systems have rules. Rules are made to contain anxiety. When anxiety hits a family and they feel out of control, imposing a rule restores some sense of order or control. This is o.k. if the rules are what are called “humane rules”. Most of these rules relate to how feelings are handled in the family. Children will conform to a rule, believe it, and adapt it as part of reality in order to avoid the experience of anxiety. Inhumane rules encourage a child to be dishonest with others to avoid punishment and dishonest with oneself to avoid guilt. Humane rules promote self-worth; accept each person as human, possessed of feelings, well-meaning & sometimes fallible.

Churches, like families, are relational systems with lots of anxiety and can impose covert rules which translate into unhealthy ways of relating to each other and to God. It would be really interesting for a lunch discussion today to discuss what you perceive as Cap’s un-verbalized ethos [rules]. If you walk in as a newcomer this Fall and sit through a month of services, what’s the deal here? What are the un-verbalized expectations? Today with Called: The First of Cap’s Three C’s, we begin to make what may be covert to you, overt.

(Mike Nichols)

“Give us today our daily bread”. Here’s where things start to get a bit personal, maybe even a little uncomfortable. If we didn’t see it before, here’s where we realize that praying the words Jesus gave us has relational, political and economic implications. As we truly consider the idea of receiving daily bread from God as a community, we begin to ask questions like: “What about people on the Downtown eastside?” and “Should we purchase RRSPs and life insurance or not?” There are no easy answers, and no “official CapChurch stance” on these issues. But I am delighted that we can talk freely as we gather, ask honest questions, and come to answers (even different ones) together. (Kim Pierrot)