Therefore...

  

Romans 12:1-8

When I was ten years old at summer camp, we could earn points for various activities. My favorites were archery, target shooting and memorizing bible verses. I had no idea then that I would become a preacher, but these verses sounded so much like a booming sermon that I threw open the window of our bunkroom, and shouted them down to passers-by until I had the whole thing perfected in the cadence of an old-timey preacher. I still have them memorized.

“I urge you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world!  I roared out the window, jabbing my finger at the sky. But be transformed! By the renewing of your mind! That you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable and perfect!

 

Listen to all the active verbs there! So commanding and directive! All the things we are supposed to be and know and do! Present yourselves a sacrifice to God, do not be conformed to this world, be transformed, Even when the verbs are not technically active, we can make them active by how we hear them: renew your mind, prove the will of God, which by the way, is good and perfect.

 

Even the more gentle version we read today still puts a lot in our hands. Listen to all the active verbs, Use your gifts! (don’t waste them!) Helpers, help! Teachers, teach! Givers, give! Leaders, do a good job leading, and if you’re taking care of others, keep a smile on your face!

 

This striving, active, individual faith that takes it into your own hands and works hard at it may have been what my summer camp was going for, but it’s not what Paul is going for. 

 

All throughout the letter to the Romans, Paul is talking about real life, the Kingdom of God reality, life as God created life to be, life as God is moving everything towards once and for all. He is talking about living no longer in the illusion created by sin that we are apart and against, that belonging is earned and we’re defined by the world’s labels and our own striving, trapped under sin’s ranking, comparing and condemnation. 

He is talking about life in freedom –life where all people are upheld in the belongness of grace, and our identity is secure in God, and God is the primary actor and we are recipients and participants in a life made for joy. This is the life we are given by Christ, in Christ, in fact, in him we have died to anything else and been risen to this new life of belonging, connection and wholeness, so we should be living what is true about us and about God. 

Right before our verses, Paul writes “from God and through God and to God are all things, to God be the glory forever and ever, Amen!” Then our text begins with, “Therefore…”

Because all things are from God and through God and back to God, Therefore, present yourself to God, your whole, living, embodied self.

 

Paul loves run-on sentences where things are all connected back to God. We tend to break those up and lose the thread. Out of curiosity, I spent some time checking the original Greek on all of this, and it turns out that contrary to how we like to hear this, there is only ONE active verb in the whole thing. The one thing we can do and should do, according to Paul, is to offer ourselves to God. 

 

That’s it.  That is the one action we are to do. And it’s no small thing, it’s everything. It’s a sacrifice, Paul says, a holy sacrifice that God finds well-pleasing, or, delightful. (God speaks the same declaration over Jesus at his baptism, “this is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased, in whom I delight). In other words, when we give ourselves to God, our “everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life” God is delighted, and we are doing what Paul calls our ‘reasonable’ or logical worship. What conveys our gratitude and praise, and honors God as God, is ourselves, given to God.

 

When we do that, then all sorts of things happen that we don’t do. The rest of the passage is filled with things that happen to us, or through us, or for us, except for the next two verbs, which I was thrilled to discover are middle passive. This is a verb form we don’t have in English, so we usually just make it active, which is pretty messed up, because the middle passive means we participate in something we don’t initiate.  So, when we actively present ourselves to God – here I am God, just me, just like I am, that’s all I have to give so I give it all- then the ‘being not conformed’ to this world and the ‘being transformed’ are things God does to us and in us, that we join in. We are not the ones making it happen; we are surrendering our will into the will of God who initiates the work in us, and we participate in that work that God will bring to completion.

 

This might sound small, but it’s kind of a big deal.  We are both passive and active at the same time in our not conforming to the realities of this age, and in the being transformed by God, who renews our minds to become more and more able to discern what God is doing in the world, which is, Paul tells us, the good and the delightful, bringing wholeness and completion to world. We begin to see that happening around us. We start to notice what we didn’t notice before. We are being changed, pulled out of the lies and deception that would pit us against each other, center ourselves in the narrative, or let fear or force dictate reality, and we’re pulled instead into God’s relentless and subversive work of healing the world that moves through us to all the others we already belong to in a life made for joy and fullness.

 

Years ago, I got all excited learning about Meister Eckhart and ended up introducing you to a phrase from a quote by James Finley teaching about Eckhart. (For the thousandth time, I apologize,) he says, “Lovers cannot make their moments of oceanic oneness happen, they can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by love. The poet cannot make the poem come, the poet can only assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to the poem arriving. The healer cannot bring the healing, the healer can only assume the inner stance of least resistance to healing coming through them.”  

 

Actively surrendering our will to the will of God is assuming the inner stance of least resistance to the Holy Spirit; it's this middle voice verb of attentive readiness for what God wants to do in and through us.  Like poets, and healers, and lovers, and artists, and musicians, and friends, we get to participate in the things we can’t make happen, and marvel at the beauty we end up sharing in. 

 

This is all by God’s grace, not because we’ve somehow earned it, or deserve any more or less involvement or attention than anyone else. God gives to each person grace for the life they’re to live—even Paul’s own telling us this, he says, is by the grace of God. 

 

Then he goes on to say we don’t need to reach our minds above and beyond what is a fit for us. There is an echo here of the Psalmist in 131, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not concern myself with matters too great or too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child.” And in Psalm 46, “Cease striving and know that I am God.”

Paul says our minds, rather, have been made for sound judgment, and God gives each person the measure of faith we need for the calling we have, (i.e., It’s all very reasonable. Quit overcomplicating it).  We’re one body in Christ, he says, like a human body with many parts that don’t all have the same function but instead work together. And we have gifts, given by grace, differently to each of us.

 

And here is where it gets even cooler with the Greek grammar: everything from here on out is passive, even though we driven, active, moderns who go, go, go, do, do, do, and can’t stop won’t stop don’t translate it that way. 

So, Paul starts listing gifts – prophesy, is in proportion to faith. Service? He does not say, then serve! Teachers? Teach! Do the things! No, he says, in effect, if the gift is service, then you are an instrument of service, if the gift is teaching, the teaching comes through you, if the gift is encouraging, then you are a conduit of encouragement, if the gift is giving, then generosity fills you and spills over, if leading, then you have diligence, if you’re showing mercy, then cheerfulness lives in you.

 

Each action happens not by determined striving, setting your mind to it, trying to be a decent person or good Christian, but because who you are is made already to participate with God’s action moving through you in this particular way, and it will come out in ministering to others.

Can you hear the freedom? The life? The holy sacrifice of ourselves that becomes worship and gratitude to God? Can you see why God finds this everyone-living-who've-they've-been-made-to-be-and-so-working-cooperatively-together utterly delightful?

 

Each person is both entirely unique and entirely connected to everyone else. We are all essential. We are urged to participate with what God has already done for us all, by who God has already made us to be.

 

Last weekend, on our day retreat, we played Poetry for Neanderthals, a fun, ridiculous game that makes you speak only in single syllable words, which turns out to be really, really hard, and sound very, very funny. But in order to play the game you need to get what a single syllable word is. And all of a sudden, there is Wendy, so naturally teaching the group how to hear the syllables, clapping words with her hands and giving us examples that we clapped with her, and the teaching just flowed from her. She didn’t have to put her mind to striving to be teacherly and take up the teaching task, it just happened because she was connected to the rest of us, and the gifts she’s been given by the grace of God poured out of her into the group, bringing everyone in and uniting us in understanding.  

Likewise, Edie, when her friend left the room, went to check on him and make sure he was ok. Compassion and care just happened--her body stood up and out she went. 

And if you have been away for a while, or have something difficult going on in your life, chances are you’ve heard from Kay. Because she is attuned to people and interested in others, and she won’t let you fall through the cracks. 

Jen’s creativity starts flowing for the next hands-on worship project right after this service ends, and she often sparks ideas for me just by sharing her own ideas. 

When Pat fires up the grill, or Kristen drops a line of poetry on us, we’re glimpsing their unique souls, participating with God in the good, delighting God and the rest of us too. And I would venture to guess that no other church has an empty ‘pet chaplain’ job waiting to be filled--we simply named what was already happening through Joyce.

 

All these gifts are not about improving a religious club or even just strengthening our relationships with each other here.  We are each part of the Body of Christ--God’s embodied interaction in the world. God’s life is happening through every person in this room out there in the world in our ordinary, everyday, walking around lives. That’s what it is to be Christ’s Church. But being church together, we get to see it up close in one another, practice and encourage each other in it. And sometimes we recognize in someone else the gifts they may not yet see in themselves. We get to grow together as one body deeper and deeper in the life of Christ for the world. 

 

From God, through God and back to God it all flows. Therefore, the most logical way we can worship God is to present our peculiar, particular selves to God, and God happens to find that delightful. Freeing us and transforming us to recognize and join God in bringing life and wholeness in the world, God makes it so we participate by being who are, with and for each other. 

 

Amen.

To Remain Human

 

(This is why LNPC is doing a digital fast.)

To Remain Human

by Brian Lewis

The nervous system

was never designed

to carry the grief

of an entire planet

Yet here we are

A child starving

crosses our screen

between weather reports

and advertisements

Forests burn beside stock prices

Wars arrive

in the same hand

that holds photographs

of our grandchildren

And somewhere inside us

something ancient

keeps trying

to respond

This is the exhaustion

few know how to name

Not simply stress

Not simply fear

But the unbearable collision

between the human heart

and the scale

of modern awareness

We were meant

to know the sorrow

of the village

Now we are asked

to metabolize

the suffering

of civilizations

And many are drowning

Some in rage

Some in distraction

Some in endless performance

Some in irony so thick

it becomes a shield

against feeling anything real

Others quietly disappear

inside themselves

their spirits dimming

beneath the constant demand

to remain informed

productive

available

certain

The world keeps shouting

Choose a side

Move faster

Consume more

Outrage harder

Win

But the soul

does not speak

in that language

The soul speaks

through silence

through grief

through awe

through the sudden trembling

that arrives

when one human being

finally feels

the reality

of another

This is why

so many people

stand at the edge

of breakdown

Not because they are weak

But because they are porous

Because somewhere beneath

the armor

their humanity

is still functioning

And perhaps

that is what must now

be protected

Not merely ecosystems

Not merely institutions

But the fragile interior capacities

that allow human beings

to remain human

inside an age

that profits from fragmentation

To remain tender

without collapsing

To remain informed

without becoming consumed

To remain compassionate

without surrendering discernment

To stand before suffering

without turning away 

and yet also

without allowing suffering

to transform the heart

into stone

This is harder

than revolution

Harder than ideology

Harder than certainty

Because it asks something

few civilizations

have ever learned to cultivate

strength

without cruelty

Perhaps this is why

small acts matter so much now

A hand on a shoulder

A teacher

who notices the silent child

A man planting trees

whose shade

he will never live to sit beneath

A woman refusing

to let cynicism

be mistaken for wisdom

These are not small things

They are the architecture

of psychological survival

The architecture

of repair

And maybe the future

will not ultimately be decided

by those

who accumulated the most power 

but by those

who learned

how to carry immense complexity

without surrendering

their capacity

for love

Because civilizations do not die

only from invasion

or collapse

They also die

when people can no longer feel

one another

When exhaustion

becomes identity

When distraction

becomes culture

When tenderness

becomes embarrassment

When the human nervous system

finally says

enough

But I do not believe

that ending

is inevitable

I think there are still people

quietly rebuilding

the interior world

Still people

teaching children wonder

Still people

protecting beauty

Still people

who understand

that compassion

is not sentiment

It is infrastructure

And perhaps

the task before us now

is not merely

to save the world 

but to become

the kind of people

capable

of inhabiting it together.

 

The Same Church, until the world is made whole

 Acts 8:1b-3; 9:1-31

 
I shared with my community a few weeks ago how Andy and I worshiped with the Church in Switzerland and found ourselves at home with these siblings in Body of Christ that transcends all languages, and nations.  A few hours ago, my son worshiped with the Church in Berlin, pastored by a Russian married to an American, where the first encounter he witnessed was the baptism of an Iranian. Right now, my daughter is sharing a meal with the homeless and formerly homeless counselors to suburban, middle-class campers coming this afternoon for a weeklong service learning pilgrimage of poverty, to learn from and serve alongside these leaders whose lives have had suffering and joy right on the surface. On Wednesday, right here our little congregation gathered on the patio and shared a meal, conversation and laughter, and split up into groups who listened to each other’s lives, watching for the movement of the Spirit. And I got to tell a third grader how my “thorn” last month that I was sad and worried about is, this month, my “rose” the very thing I am glad and grateful about, and he bore witness to the work of the Holy Spirit in my life with an eyes-wide, big-grinned, Hooray! This is the view I have in this moment of the Church. 

The story we just read is a further back moment in this ongoing story that is told looking backward, knowing the end before it begins. It is always moving through the upheaval toward the inevitable conclusion formed by God, and directed not by human trajectory or tragedy, but by the ongoing love of Jesus Christ living in and through those who trust in him.  So recognize this incident as a pivotal moment, when Paul—who will go on, unbeknownst to him, to write between a quarter to half of our bible, and whose journeys by sea and horse will spread the gospel throughout the middle East to Europe—gets brought into this Church where we are his siblings.  So, I was excited to get to this text! 

Only, all week long I couldn’t shake thinking about this story in this way: 

Imagine if, during Operation Metro Surge, a community of immigrants was hiding, worrying about what would happen if ICE found them. And then God called one of them by name, and said, Hey, right now, in this house on Hennipen Ave, a man named Greg Bovino has just had a vision of you coming to pray for him and him receiving his sight. I want you to go to him. 

A little bit it makes me sick to my stomach. 

We tell this story as Saul’s ‘conversion,’ and it is. And it is also the story of the community of Christ-followers who were minding their own business and still being persecuted, who were absolutely justified to be fearful of Saul and continually wary and guarded.

And suddenly I can see the harsh and impossible, the divisions, the horror, the brokenness of it all, of us toward one another, and it deflates me. Because from where this story opens, I can’t see a way forward that lets me hold onto my righteous anger or reiterate my boundaries and beliefs. 

On one side this tale begins with Saul as the hero. He is a devout, highly educated Jew with an impressive pedigree who also holds coveted Roman citizenship. He was born in Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey), and moved as a child to Jerusalem, where he studied under a famous and highly respected Rabbi, and became an expert at Hebrew scripture and Jewish law.  He is esteemed, zealous, and deeply committed to upholding the true faith. Saul has gained a name for himself for his relentless efforts to stamp out this heresy called The Way, where instead of worshiping the one true God, misled people are worshipping a criminal who was executed six years ago, Jesus, whom they call the Christ. Saul is on a holy mission to glorify God and defend the faith, and he has all the confidence and conviction to go along with it.

On the other side are the people of God sheltering in place, who had heard of the destruction Saul rained down in Jerusalem and been warned that he had his sights set on them next. These past few years after Pentecost, the Church has grown significantly, but Paul’s rampage in Jerusalem caused Christians to flee the city and scatter. The exact description reads, “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house. Dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison…” Then it goes on to describe the  stoning death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, which Saul attended, holding the coats of the other heretic-hunters and cheering them on. 

Now this mission he is currently on, to capture all the Christians in Damascus and bring them in chains to Jerusalem, begins with the words, “Meanwhile, Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord…”

So here hide these Christians, afraid for their lives. 

And there we are. Stuck between two incompatible stories. Both claiming to worship the God of Israel.  

And then God speaks to one of these cowering Christians. Hey, Ananias.
Yes, God, I’m here and ready.
There is a man called Saul of Tarsus praying in a house a few streets over, and he has seen a vision of you coming to him and praying for him to regain his sight.
God, maybe you haven’t actually heard of this guy, but he is a bad guy, he’s hunting us down, just so you know. He’s already done so much evil in Jerusalem and here he has been given carte blanch to use whatever force he wants against us.  So… want to give a different instruction? I’m all ears.
 And God says Go. I have specifically chosen Saul to be my messenger. I have a plan for him and I will handle him. 
 
This story is astonishing. 

It’s also par for the course for this God. 
For two years we’ve been moving through the bible from start to finish and in no stories are the people the heroes, and nobody remains unchanged. Stereotypes get torn down, the lowly get lifted up, and the ideas people hold of right, or good, or even God, get destroyed and rebuilt. Futures are never what people think they will be because people dream too small and selfish. God goes right to the barriers and the impossibility, breaking chains, and parting seas, and opening wombs, and knocking down giants, and closing the mouths of lions and opening the mouths that could not speak, and out of death and finality bringing life and newness. 

And always, always, God is drawing people deeper, wider, into love, into time, into this world, into relationship with one another, and pushing them outward to the stranger, to the outcast, to the enemy, to the other. God chooses a few admirable people here and there, and many ordinary ones, but also a lot of jerks, cheaters, fools, slow-learners and betrayers. And nowhere are people allowed to hold onto their righteous anger or reiterate their boundaries and beliefs. 
 So here God goes again.
 
I can’t imagine, and the scripture does not tell us, what happens inside Ananias, or between him and this little church in Damascus, what Holy Spirit miracle allows him to go to Saul.  I can imagine the fear when he approaches that house. The pleading for trust in God as his hand reaches for the doorknob.

And I can also imagine, because I have seen this sort of thing for myself, the forgiveness and faith of Jesus Christ moving through him despite him, as he steps inside to minister to this man who came to destroy him, the very embodiment of the threat he most fears. And likewise, Saul, utterly humbled and in need on the other side of the door, must now receive ministry from the people he came to destroy, the very embodiment of the threat he most feared. 
 
When Saul was thrown from his high horse by the blinding light and booming voice from heaven, I wonder if at first he recognized the experience – just like the prophets of old from the deep story of his ancestors, Moses, Elijah, the coherent, thrilling, terrifying moment when transcendence calls by name, only, how horribly discombobulating, then, for it to come not as an affirmation or invitation, but an accusation!  

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Who are you Lord?

And the answer shatters everything inside him, I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting!
 
Then suddenly Saul the magnificent is tossed into the wilderness of waiting, the liminal space of loss, confusion, guilt, and unknown, that permeates the story of God’s people again and again, sparing not even Jesus himself. Then, Saul spends three days in darkness without eating or drinking, until, into his tomb, God’s resurrecting love arrives in the form of his enemy standing right here, where he cannot see him and must reach out his hand.
 
 Saul now meets Jesus, in the touch and voice of Ananias, who calls him, against all human odds, ‘Brother Saul” and says, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” Then, we’re told, “he got up and was baptized” from the death of fear and righteous hatred, into entirely new life in Christ’s own death and resurrection, “and after taking some food, he regained his strength.” 
 
And then Saul is welcomed into the living Body of Christ, who, instead of revenge or retaliation, fear or loathing, shares with Saul healing, nurture, blessing and identity. They give him friendship and begin to reshape his story by telling him the resurrection stories and their own stories. Here among them, the voice who called out to him from the blinding light is given hands and faces, sorrows and names, foibles and families, and Saul gets to know the risen Messiah.  And they too are set free from fear and righteous hatred, by receiving Christ in the person of their enemy. Then, Saul who came to capture the followers of Jesus, instead begins proclaiming in the synagogue that Jesus is the Son of God, and everyone who hears him is confounded and amazed.

A few chapters later, we’re told that the once esteemed and arrogant Saul eventually sheds his strong, famous Hebrew name completely, and goes exclusively by his Roman name, Paul, which means “small.”  

And this part of the story of God ends with the words “The churches in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria were at peace and grew through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
 
And here we are now, this little gathering of that same Church, about to bless some of our own and send them to another little gathering of the same Church, inside just one city of this whole, vast world, filled everywhere with little gatherings of the same Church, that is, people called to surrender our lives into the life of the living Christ, who, through us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will love without reservation or resentment, heal what is impossibly broken, and forgive and set free without ceasing, until the whole world is made whole.  

And to that I say, Amen!

The Making of the Church

Acts 1-2: Ascension & Pentecost

Some of us here heard a guest speaker last week at a presbytery meeting, tell all about how we need to grow our churches—the right kind of churches with the right kind of beliefs, that is. He was articulate and persuasive about it, but if I were boiling down his message into a super simple summary sentence, I’d say it was, “Hey, we PCUSA Presbyterians have a really special product here, a great religious perspective for today’s problems, and we need to sell that product well.”  

He was careful to say he wasn’t talking about growth for growth’s sake, and I believe him. I really think he believes we have a better religious product than most other ones out there.  One that can do good in the world and help people, that includes people who feel excluded by other religious products. We should be trying to impact more lives.

Then, as proof that this was our job, he used the Pentecost scripture, the beginning of the church, saying that on the day of Pentecost, they grew the church, in faith and in numbers, and that is what we are called to do. (Notably, our paraphrase today didn’t seem to think the numbers part was important to include, but the original says their 120 people grew to 3000 that day).

I am not faulting this individual. What he was saying is what any good leader of an organization should be saying in our competitive, capitalist world. It only makes sense. If you have something good for the world you should promote it well and get it to as many people as possible.
If the world were only what we can see and touch, and our lives were entirely about what we make of them, then I might agree with him. And I’m a person who needs outside structure and appreciates community, so I would find a good enough religion to commit to so that I could do some good with my life. Because in the whole sum of things, some kind of ethical system and higher power thinking is both good for my personal self-improvement project, and good for helping the world be better.

In fact, I am going to have to talk to some high schoolers about Christianity in a couple of weeks for their world religions class. I’m on the Abrahamic religions day, after Judaism and before Islam. It would be really easy on that day to slip into this role: defender of the faith, peddler of the goods, recruiter for my team. What make your religion good (subtext: better than others)? What beliefs is it shaped around? What ideals direct you?  I would possibly even fall into arguing how my kind of Christianity is better than other kinds, (even though we are all, technically, the Church, I would have to break it down into ‘churches’ so I could parse out which ones are better), and one way we’re better is that we are more welcoming of other religions than those other Christians are, so that’s why my version of my religion better than other versions andother religions. It’s complicated. And exhausting. Frankly, the whole thing is exhausting, and if I am really honest, it’s boring. 

And when I really let my mind go there, as if this is how it all is, as if this is all there is, life becomes flat and tedious. Then, just behind that, the pain of this world begins to feel scary, terrifying, even overwhelming, because the things that are supposed to be strong and hold us together, like our government, and our leaders, and our laws, and our freedoms, and our morals, feel weak and paper thin, and I am not sure where to put my feet or my heart. 

And if God is just this great idea or good thing I can get my hands around to pass off to people, then God is not bigger than the evil that threatens to undo us, or even more powerful than the ordinary human selfishness and stupidity that, like a snowball down a mountain, has picked up so much destructive momentum and force it will inevitably wipe us all out.

And by this point in the mind game, I am so very far from Jesus, and the stories of resurrection we’ve been hearing from one another. I am unmoored from the deep gratitude that’s been washing over me lately watching you all love one another, and care for your neighbors, and listen to deep stories of lives wrapped up in lives through love. And I can no longer find the joy I had just yesterday, digging in the dirt in my yard marveling that by the grace and wisdom of a God I can’t understand, microscopic things I can’t see, in this enormous earth I can’t direct, under this vast sky with sun and rain, will make these tiny plants grow and all I did to join into this miracle of new life was dig a hole. 

Life is miraculous, and the things that are the most real, the deepest, truest things, are not things we can control, we can only receive and participate in them. This is how God most often moves: in the small, the ordinary, the unnoticed; the possibly of God's act exists in everything, anything even, especially in nothing.

But this all depends on a real God, who so far beyond us, that all we can say truthfully is ‘God is God.’ (Barth)
Which brings us back to Pentecost and the “beginning of the church.”

Except, this is not actually the beginning of the church.  Where it starts is where we started our reading today: Jesus telling the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to lead them into what is next and then disappearing. 

In fact, this moment we call the ascension is so powerful and central to the making of the church, that it shifts the nouns used for the humans. Luke actually tells it twice: it’s the finale to the book of Luke—his narration of God coming embodied into the world in Jesus—where the humans are called disciples, which means ‘followers.’ Jesus is the subject and the disciples are oriented to him. 
But when the same moment again opens of the book of Acts, which is Luke’s narration of Jesus embodied in and through the Church, making us the Body of Christ, now they are called apostles, or ‘sent ones.’  This does not mean, however, that they become the subjects. The subject remains Christ; the power and story is still in the hands of the one doing the sending. 

This is the moment the Church begins, when two things happen. First Jesus tells sent ones what they’re sent to do: they are to wait and watch for what God is about to do next. And second, the flesh and blood Jesus vanishes from their sight. This is so jarring and confusing that they stay rooted to the ground, staring up into the sky for so long that God has to send in some follow-up messengers to prod them on, and tell them to get to it: go back where you were and wait for God to act. 

Now, they had some trouble just waiting, and I get it. They felt like without Jesus right there verbally giving the orders, surely they should do something.  It’s on them now to lead this thing! So, they hold a committee meeting, and pray, and ask God to choose for them, and draw straws to replace Judas in the 12 disciples with a new leader, Matthias. Which is sweet and honorable, and shows just how wide their imagination could reach and no further. Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible. Immediately after he gets the gig, the Holy Spirit descends and all holy mayhem breaks loose, and the 12 disciples wasn’t even a thing any more after all; they have already become 120 sent ones, about to be 3000 and counting, because God is creating the Church God’s way.  

And God’s way, on that day, was to give the faithfully waiting ones words to speak right into people’s lives the good news of God’s redeeming love and the new life Jesus’ resurrection brings to us all. God chose a day when the city was filled with people from all over, and then gave those new apostles  words to say that they couldn’t even understand. (Maybe that made them a little braver right out of the gate). When they obeyed the Spirit’s promptings and spoke those words, even though they made no sense to their own ears, passers-by, strangers and foreigners heard through the open windows and the mouths of these country bumpkin Galileans truth that set them free. And God grew God’s Church. 

For the first 40 days after his resurrection, before Jesus disappeared again, only these 120 people knew the whole world had changed – they knew it not by their own great wisdom but because they kept running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of their ordinary lives. Here he is again! until they began to trust that indeed this is Jesus, and indeed we are in a new thing. But their imaginations are not completely ready for this new thing.  (Do you notice, just when he’s about to leave, those dear ones bring up their old misunderstanding of him! “Wait, when, again, Jesus, are you going to restore Israel? Just so we can know when to expect the salvation we assumed you were about. Even though you told us it was different. And then showed us. For the past 40 days). When Jesus gave them a new identity as sent ones, and then sent them to wait for what God would do next, and then left, it was made clear: the resurrection did not just bring back a private, embodied, singular Jesus just for them to follow and obey. Jesus now lives in the Body of Christ sent into the whole world. 

God is not a product we rate highly and recommend widely.  God is God. Our very imaginations are not capable of accessing God. And so certainly, our words and ideas, our efforts and goals, our church-making and religion-building can’t begin to capture or even hope to say anything substantive about God. This is the God who holds us.
 
Only God can reveal Godself. And God reveals Godself to us in Jesus. Jesus is still the subject. Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.  This has been the Church’s shorthand for the whole sum of the gospel for thousands of years. Christ has died: There is no death, loss, evil or suffering into which God does not go with us and for us; death does not get the final word. Christ has risen: bringing life out of nothingness, hope from despair, newness from impossibility is what God does, is doing, will keep on doing. And Christ will come again: the story is ongoing, the end to which this is all heading is the love that came from God’s being, brought all life into being, and will return all things in love to the very heart of God, and nothing can derail the trajectory of things.
 
The Church begun Jesus told them to wait for the Spirit is happening right now still, in every place in the entire world among the people who have surrendered their life into the Life of Christ lived in and through us.  God is forging a new community whose imaginations keep expanding, and whose lives take on the shape of the love that makes up God’s own being and bears witness to the resurrection life of Christ moving in the world even now, right in the places of brokenness, fragility and death.

And if the terribly uncontrollable feeling of surrender doesn’t suit us, and the waiting is so uncomfortable that we fill it with tasks and build our idea of what the church is and should be, at least we are in good company. The apostles do it in the first minutes of being Church, and the whole book of Acts and Paul’s coming letters to the Church will be filled with this back and forth between imagination-busting astonishment at what God is doing through them by the Holy Spirit, and falling back into misunderstanding, self-sufficiency and well-laid plans. Then being reminded (sometimes by a quite grumpy Paul) and redirected again to what this whole apostle and being Church is really about, then, when God does something through them that defies the limits of their imaginations, they’re astonished anew, humbled and awed, and so it goes. 

So, Church, while we keep running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of our ordinary lives, and telling our resurrection stories Here he is again!, first and foremost, we will wait together for the Holy Spirit to draw us into the most real, deepest, and truest things in ways that rewrite our imaginations for what God can do, and teach us to trust in what God is up to in the world, and make us ready to join in, ready for what God will do next. 

Amen.