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The Message for May 24, 2015
Acts 2:1-21
Our Relationship with other disciples, Part 2
Rob Miller, Pastor
One night a wife found her husband standing over their infant’s crib. As she watched him looking down at their very first child… she saw on his face a mixture of emotions.... disbelief, delight, amazement, skepticism, enchantment.
Touched by his unusual display of emotion… she slipped her arm around her husband and said, "A penny for your thoughts?"
"It's amazing!" he replied. “It's just amazing.I can't see how anybody... can make a crib like that for only $79.00."
Here lay one of the greatest miracles in God’s creation... and all this father saw... was a crib.He didn’t see the life that lay within.
I wish this was an isolated case but itisn’t. Many times we will look upon God's handiwork when we see another person... and only focus on the outward manifestation... never seeing the miracle of life that is within.
Be it the birth of a new baby or the birth of a new discipleor the birth of a new church -- there are many people who only see the outside framework and miss the miracle of life that is happening within.
“Never judge a book by its cover,” right? And as we learned in kindergarten – “Never judge a person by what you see on the outside.” Never judge a person period. I say. Instead consider the miracle of life that ishappening withineach and everyone of us –the miracle of the Holy Spirit.
Today we continue our U-I-O worship series. U-I-0 stands for the three key relationships every disciple of Jesusnurtures regularly…
- First is our relationship with God (Up) through prayer and worship.
- Second is our relationship with other disciples (In)through large and small group gatherings.
- Third isour relationship with the world (out) through outreach efforts and our vocational callings.
This U-I-O image takes the form of a triangle (see handout).
Today we consider our relationship with other disciples, part 2. Next week we will wrap-up this series as we consider our relationship out in the world.
Question: where do people go to deal with the stress of life – dealing with the pressures and problems that life throws at us?
We all have stress in our livesbut stress isn’t always a bad thing. As we learn in high school physics class, stress is simply a force applied to an object to change its shape or course. Stress fractures occur when the object is unmoving or unbending.
The right amount of stress on a violin string creates a beautiful sound. Too little stress and the result is an irritating buzz, too much stress produces a shrill off-key sound.
We can’t,nor should we try,to avoid stress. Stress happens. It’s part of life in this world. But we are not made to bear too much stress.
Studies estimate that43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress. And 75% to90%of all doctor's office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints.
We are not just stressed we are STRESSED!!!!!
I googled the word stress and got 530 million hits. We put up with a lot of stress in our lives. According to the Center for Disease Control/National Institute on Occupational Safety & Health:
- 80% of workers feel stress on the job
- Nearly half say they need help in learning how to manage stress
- 42% say their coworkers need help reducing stress
- 40% of workers report their job is “very” or “extremely” stressful (Northwestern National Life)
- 26% said they are “very often burned out by stress” (Yale University)
- Stress is responsible for 30% of all disability claims
- Stress causes American businesses an estimated $300 billion a year
But here is the most troubling statistic of all is this:
- 110 million people die every year as a direct result of stress. That is 7 people every 2 seconds.
- And it’sall preventable.
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That’s why, what we sayand what we doas disciples of Jesus inside the church and outside the church is so critically important. What we sayand dois literally a life & death matter.
Today we celebrate Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. We traditionally say that Pentecost is the birth of the Church. Talk about stress. Birthing something is stressful.
(Read Text)
David Lose, president of our ELCA Seminary in Philadelphia, says that we tend to misinterpret Pentecost. I agree. Actually he says we get it backwards. The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to bring peace,the Holy Spirit comes tobringmore stress. We could say the Holy Spirit is a forceapplied in our lives to bring needed change. We certainly see that in this reading.
The disciples were hiding,living in fear,afraid to do anything other than gather behind closed doors. God’s desire was for them to be out in the world sharing the good news of Jesus. So… God sent the Holy Spirit to get them fired up. And it worked…
We read about wind and tongues-of-fire and the crowds-hearing-the-sermon-in-their-own-languages and we interpret all of this as God’s promise of deliverance, celebration, victory, and strengthin and through the church. Yahoo!!! God’s presence is sent to be with Jesus’ disciples-- equipping them to do his kingdom work in the world.
The coming of Holy Spirit is the presence of thecrucifiedand resurrected Christ, Lose says, so we should never expect things to be easy.
In the cross we see the paradoxes of God…We see
- strength through suffering,
- victory through defeat,
- new life through death.
The God we worshipis a God of paradoxes. Lose offers two things for us two consider in the Pentecost story when it comes to being disciples of Jesus.
First,the Holy Spirit does not come to solve our problems but to create them. More stress? Yes,more stress…but a different kind of stress… a life-give stress… one that motives us to change our shape andour course for good.
Without the Holy Spirit, the disciples would simply go back to their old lives as fishermen. I can almost hearing James saying to John, "Sure, it was a wild and crazy three-year-ride, and Jesus was a heck of a nice guy, but maybe we needed to get that out of our system and go back to doing Dad's business."
Once the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, returning to normalcy is not an option. The disciples could not think about going back to business as usual. They were propelled by the Spirit to go forward and live into God’sbusiness of love, and grace, and mercy, and forgiveness in the world. They were motivated to go and continue the work started by the one named Jesus – the who was executed for treason and blasphemy.
David Brooks, a writer for the New York Times, challenged graduating college students to dropthe American obsession of self-fulfillment and instead invited them to serve others, making and keeping a commitment to meet the challenges they encountered all around them.
"Most successful young people," he writes, "don't look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons them and how they will live their life... Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually as they grow into that calling." How true.
The same is true of a community. Lose says. Congregations discover themselves as they give themselves away – as they address a problem. The questionswe need to ask is,
- "Who needs us?"
- "What can we do to touch a life with God’s love, and grace,and mercy, and forgiveness?”
- “How can we use the resources God has given us to make a difference in the lives of others?”
The second thing for us to consider in the Pentecost story is this:The Holy Spirit doesn't prevent failure but invites it -- to find fulfillment and victory in and through our setbacks and failures.
Duringthe Apollo 13 mission to the moon something went terribly wrong. Mission Controlbecame famous for their one liner, "failure is not an option." But you know… that mindset can paralyze a congregation.
Failure may not be an option when it comes to the mission of getting astronauts back to earth safely. But for us as disciples of Jesus and our baptismal calling,failure is not only an option, it is inevitable.
The problems we face in the world and in our congregationsare too great, too complex, and too significant to imagine that we will find the best solution the first time we try.
And here is the amazing thing. Jesus doesn’t expect us to be successful. Jesus expects us to be faithful to him and to one another.
Question:When someone makes a mistake what do you see – a sinner a mistake-maker, or do you see a work in progress. Do you see the Holy Spirit at work within the people you meet?
Aschool teacher once told me, "I tell my kids to make a mistake every day, just not the same mistake!"
A college professor once told me, “A mistake isn’t a mistake, when we learnfrom it.”
I am learning that we live in a success-obsessed world and that kind of thinking can lead us to forget that --it's neither about us nor up to us. It’s about God and it’s up to God. God is the creator, and sustainer, and redeemer of everything and everyone, and only God can bring the kind of solutions to the stress weencounter every day.
I’m also learning that God is up to something good in our churches and in our world through the Holy Spirit. Pentecost continues to happen and our job is topartner with God’s Spirit wherever we can.
When we get up in the morning the best prayer we could possibly pray would be this: God, it’s going to be a great day, please put me in the middle of what you are doing.
Last week I invite you to consider doing one of the following. And I invite you to consider doing so again this week:
- Do one random act of kindness for someone – that’s what disciples do.
- Invite someone to come to worship with you – that’s what disciples do.
- Ask someone how you might prayer for them – that’s what disciples do.
I was talking with Mary (not her real name) who was in worship last week. Mary said… I love it when you challenge us to live the faith in our everyday world…
Disciples of Jesus gather behind closed doors in gatherings like this to be renewed and refreshed for living the faith out in the world. That’s our topic for next week. Amen