October 4: Groups Guide
About This Guide
The online groups guide is designed as a teaching series companion to foster discussion, study, and prayer, especially in a group setting.
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Love
Teaching Text: Genesis 1:1-4
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty,darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
Matthew 3:16-17
As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened,and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heavensaid, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
Themes
Consider these themes and ask your group what else they see in the passage:
A Living Communion
The Communion at the Heart of God
Formation
Thoughts and notes you can use for discussion:
Sermon Summary
This year they made a movie of the Odyssey. Big posters. Jason Bourne as Odysseus. But the line that matters is buried in the middle. Odysseus goes down to the Underworld, and Achilles, the greatest Greek hero, tells him it wasn’t worth it. Dr. Martin Shaw sees Christ arriving right there:
I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld and Achilles tells him the following, the game is up for the old order: “Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.” With these words, from the greatest of Greek heroes, the world turns… A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-Man is coming. The last shall be first.
— Dr. Martin Shaw
Glory through heroic violence, chased all the way to the end. The telos had to change. The Odyssey is saying something about what breaks the world.
Two scenes, creation and new creation, and in both we see God in conversation with God. What Dallas Willard called the Divine Conspiracy.
The Trinity at work in creation.
Bereshit bara Elohim. Elohim: plural, used as singular. A Creator (bara). A Spirit hovering over the deep like a fluttering bird. A Word speaking light into being.
Creator. Spirit. Word.
Order out of chaos. Tohu va-vohu, the formless void, separated and filled. Beauty. Majesty. Swarming, teeming abundance. Then: “Let us make humans in our likeness.”
The Trinity is creating not as a display of power or to make up for some lack, but in overflowing abundance.
Every other ancient Near Eastern story starts with gods at war. Not this one. No other conceived deity is like this.
But we forget. Give us long enough and we make God in our own image.
The Trinity at work in redemption.
The world breaks. And God sets out to repair it, not in spite of relationship, but through it. Pagan farmers get invitations. Sons become family, become a nation, become people of covenant. Isaiah speaks of one to come. Homer may even hint.
Then Yeshua shows up and breaks the categories again. Humble birth. A craftsman for thirty years. Baptized by His more famous cousin.
Heaven opens. The Father speaks. The Spirit descends like a bird, again. The Son comes up out of the water.
The Trinity, all the way at work in repair. In salvation. In healing.
Not arms crossed. Not petty and too busy. In the river. Under the water. Praying. Resisting the old liar from the Garden. Calling apprentices. Opening the way home for anyone who wants it
We put scarcity in God. What if God isn’t too busy at all? It’s us that’s too busy, chasing kleos, imperishable glory, our own way.
What if God abounds in so much love and attentiveness you could never reach the end of it?
Shaw again. Years after a Lakota medicine man told him not to give up on Jesus, he spent 101 days offering stories in the forest as prayer. Last night, he looked up. A light fell from the sky, aimed straight at him. He went home sensing an invitation. Pursued. A month later, baptized in the river.
If you’re looking for a world that isn’t a little strange, you’ve come to the wrong place. Or maybe you’ve mixed up what’s strange and what isn’t.
You are made for communion with God. Not just church attendance. Not just a respectable life, good vacations, enough for retirement. Full communion with a God who loves you all the way.
I am broken and poured out for you.
May you be in this Triune Love. And may you learn to be broken and poured out too.
Pray. Communion.
Direct Quotes
“What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
— C.S. Lewis (as cited)
“This is of particular significance in light of the fact that one of the inherent characteristics of all other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies is the internecine strife of the gods. Polytheistic accounts of creation always begin with the predominance of the divinized powers of nature and then describe in detail a titanic struggle between the opposing forces. They inevitably regard the achievement of world order as the outgrowth of an overwhelming exhibition of power on the part of one god who then manages to impose his will upon all other gods.”
— Nahum M. Sarna
“Jesus. We knew he was coming. We’d heard his words. Long before white folks told us. He was in Turtle Island too. Don’t give up on him now, he hasn’t given up on you.”
— Wallace Black Elk
“This is not what you expect to hear from a shaman. This is the last thing I would have wanted to hear. Having abandoned Christianity with full vigor at seventeen, coming from a house of preachers and signs and wonders, well, this was a wonder too much. I didn’t want to see the slim finger of the medicine man pointing to what I’d been running from.”
— Dr. Martin Shaw
“Then I did something I never do. I looked up. Past the trees into the sky. And it was then that I saw it… It was painfully beautiful, seemingly impossible. An arrow falling from the sky. I just couldn’t move… I sat up for the rest of the night, agape, ecstatic. I wasn’t frightened. I even danced.”
— Dr. Martin Shaw
Three Questions for Personal Application
What comes into my mind when I think about God, and have I made Him in my own image?
Notice the picture of God you actually carry day to day. Is He distant, annoyed, too busy for you? Hold that up against the delighting, abundant God of Genesis 1 and ask Him to show you who He really is.
Where am I still chasing my own version of imperishable glory?
Achilles got to the end and found it empty. Name the achievement, image, or security you’re quietly building your life around. Ask what it would look like to trade it for communion.
Do I believe God has enough love and attention for me, right now?
Maybe you’ve been saving God for when you’ve tried everything else. Sit with the Father’s words over the Son, “whom I love; with him I am well pleased,” and let yourself be invited home.
