Follow Where God Leads
When Reverend Tom Long was first
beginning his ministry as a young minister at a small church, he started a
pastor’s Sunday School class on the basics of Christian faith. He invited
anyone who was new to the faith or would like a refresher course to come.
When
the class began, he entered the room expecting it to be filled with people.
Instead, he found three elementary school children, little girls, waiting on
him to begin the class. Over the next several weeks, he tried to hide his
disappointment, and teach these young girls about what it is to be a Christian.
The week before Pentecost Sunday, he asked, “Do you know what Pentecost is?”
None of them did.
“Well,”
he said, Pentecost was when the church was seated in a circle and tongues of
fire came down from heaven and landed on their heads and the spoke the gospel
in all the languages of the world.”
Two
of the girls took this new information with nonchalance, but the third’s eyes
grew wide and jaw dropped all the way too the floor. When she finally pulled
herself together enough to speak, she said, “Reverend Long, we must have been
absent that Sunday!”
The
beautiful thing, Long says, is not that the girl misunderstood. The beautiful
thing is that she thought it could have happened there, in that little church,
that God’s Spirit could have come down and given them a word to speak that the
world so desperately need to hear.[1]
It
is easy to get cynical about the church, especially in this day and age. It’s
easy to wonder if God’s Spirit is still alive in the church. Church, for many
people, has become one more activity in a schedule that is already too full.
One more committee meeting to go to, one more batch of cookies to bake, set of
phone calls to make. It’s easy for
us to no longer believe that the Spirit could be alive in the midst of budget
cuts and volunteer burnout, of never-ending committee meetings and never enough
relaxation. The Spirit of God can be hard to find. And often we don’t realize
it, but we’ve stopped looking for it. We’ve gotten so tangled up in all the
work that we have to do that we’ve begun to think that it’s all about us doing
it.
Now
some people might tell you that this has not always been the case. That
bureaucracy has not always entangled us, or that the Presbyterian desire for
decency and order has not always conflicted with the need to be Spirit-filled
and Spirit-led. But I offer up today’s text as an example. We have, today, a
beautiful and familiar story of God’s Spirit entering the people like a mighty
rushing wind, and alighting on them as tongues of flame, filling them with the
Holy Spirit that gave them words to speak and new ways to speak them so that
everyone was able to hear. It declares that the Holy Spirit was alive and well
during those times.
What
we often forget, is that this story is situated between two dry, very orderly
stories of church bureaucracy. The story that immediately precedes the story of
Pentecost is the election of new officers, in which the community gathers
together to select a representative, just as we do in our church in electing
session members. They elect Matthias as the new 12th disciple, and
likely immediately commission him to chair several committees. After the story
of Pentecost come more stories of the inner workings of church. In Acts 6, a task force is created to
provide for the widows of the community, in response to a complaint by the
Hellenists that the food was not being distributed equally by other factions.
The entire chapter of Acts 15 is given over to a deeply divided council meeting
regarding that standards of membership in the community. Does any of this sound
familiar? The reality we
experience in the book of Acts is that God is not only present even in the
inner workings, the seeming endless tedium of what is involved in real
ministry, but God is working in and through each of us towards the
manifestation of God’s kingdom here on earth.
The book of Acts tells of incredible
miracles of the Spirit that we hardly believe could happen anymore. But it does
so in the midst of telling us stories of the church working out what it is to
follow the Spirit in committee meetings, task forces and general assemblies.
And the underlying theme within that is that God’s spirit is alive wherever its
people are gathered, and even in places where God’s people have not yet
gathered. It is found in the midst of working together, negotiating the
conflicting visions of where we think the church is going, praying and
listening for the Spirit in our lives, going to meetings, making phone calls,
and looking over financials. God’s Spirit is present among us, . God is present
among us.
This
is incredible news for us. Not only because it declares that God will be with
us even in the tedium of our ministry, but because it proclaims once again that
God will be at work in the world whether we are or not. As Jesus told us in the
gospel of Luke, if we were to stop proclaiming God, even the rocks and the
trees would rise up to give glory to the Lord.
What
a relief it is to know this! What a relief it is for us who often feel the
weight of the whole church on our shoulders, who take on the burdens of
worrying about the church’s future, who take on the responsibility for the
church’s successes and failures. To know that the church’s future does not
depend on us!
The
story of Pentecost is the story of God’s Spirit coming down amidst the day to
day practicalities of working together as a community of faith. The people
gathered together in that place did not bring the Holy Spirit with them. They
did not call it up with just the right words or hand motions or any act of
their own. They were waiting, as Jesus had told them, in Jerusalem. And when
the Spirit of God came to them, with the sound of wind and as a vision of
flames upon their heads, they welcomed it.
This
is our call. Not to build the future of our church, or shape where we will go
over the next few years, for these will be done by God as God sees fit whether
we want them or not. Our task is to listen for the Holy Spirit, to hear where
it is calling, to follow where it is leading us, and to welcome it, and try to
keep up.
As
you go out this week, into the world and all of the obligations therein, I
encourage you to ask yourself. “Where do I see the Holy Spirit moving in my life?”
What sort of a future does God have planned for me?” “How do I get myself in
line with what the Spirit is doing?”
That
perhaps some day, when we hear someone telling us a story of the day that the
Holy Spirit came among the people of the church, and filled them all with the
words which they needed to say, the courage they needed to go out into the
world as vessels of God’s grace, our eyes can go wide and a smile will cross
our faces as we say, “Yes, I remember that Sunday.”
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