“Ride the Wind”

Acts 2:1 – 21:40 - 41

I received a lovely note this week from a couple out in the county who our church was able to help with a tangible and helpful expression of God’s love and support. They expressed tremendous gratitude for our church and its willingness to come alongside people in helpful, empowering ways. They said they saw Jesus in us! As I read the note, how proud I was of what you and God do together!

This is not an uncommon experience around here. Another note: from the grandson of one of our members telling of the encouragement he’s received from us for pursuing a calling to the ministry; a visit with some new members who had been away from the Church and the Lord for a long, long time until they found a spiritual home here and a new relationship with Jesus; a skeptic – a lifelong doubter – who told me that his perspective on God and the life of faith have changed since becoming involved in our Center For Lifelong Learning where doubters and skeptics are welcome to come and explore their questions. All around us are testimonies from people whose lives have been touched with grace through the ministry of our church. And whenever I hear such good reports, I find myself so glad just to be part of all the wonderful things God is doing in us and through us.

When my mother came out from under the anesthesia last week, and then overcame the even more fearful hurdle of coming off the respirator, she told me to be sure to tell you that she felt your prayers and that they gave her strength she herself did not have. “It had to be the prayers of the people,” she said.

How blessed I am to a part of you, and how blessed are we together to be partners with God in the great enterprise of this church. I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, especially as our Master Planning Committee has worked. Looking back over our fifteen year history, I’m amazed at all that God has accomplished, and I’m humbled by the extent of God’s reach into the world through us. Who would have imagined on that Palm Sunday fifteen years ago when eleven people attended the first official worship service over at Art and Iris Spurrier’s house that fifteen years later there would be eleven hundred of us involved in this ministry of God’s grace extended to the world?

But, you know, God’s dreams are always greater than our dreams. The Bible says, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor mind even imagined the wonderful things God has planned for those who love him.” And the history of our church is a history of faithful people bringing forth their best human efforts for God, and then God taking that human faith and making of it far more than we could possibly dream.

The life and growth of our church can’t be explained in mere human terms. And the future we plan for now cannot be a matter of statistical calibration. No, I think the story of our church – past, present and future – can only be described in this way.

It is like riding the wind!

That’s how you find life as a Christian, you know. And that’s how a church is to live.

We are called to ride the wind!

You know, it was an ordinary morning that day long ago…until the wind began to blow! What a strange thing to those gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem - that a breeze should come up in a building whose doors were locked and windows shut tight. No, it was not the air conditioning coming on. Nor was it the choir, fanning themselves with their Pentecost Sunday bulletins.

It was a wind of some unknown origin that built into what seemed like gale-force strength inside the place where what remained of Jesus’ followers were gathered together. There were 120 of them in all. One of them described the experience that day as “the rush of a mighty wind.”

The Bible tells us this powerful breeze was the coming of the Holy Spirit. And on that Pentecost long ago, the Church was born.

Now, did you notice in our reading from Acts what happened to those people that day when the wind began to blow?

First of all, the wind turned them from the past, and pointed them toward the future!

The disciples of Jesus were still looking backwards, you know. Even though they had experienced the risen Christ, there came the day when he was with them no longer. The Bible tells us they returned to that little upper room in Jerusalem and gave themselves to prayer.

Now, it sounds to me like the disciples were doing what we do when life becomes too much for us. We go inside ourselves. We wrestle with our thoughts. We become preoccupied with what happened. I’ll always remember the first church service a friend of mine attended after his dad passed away. He told me he was there physically, but he wasn’t really there. He sang the hymns, but he didn’t really sing. One half of his mind listened to the minister’s sermon. The other half was off somewhere else – with his dad, and his hurt, and all the things that preoccupy you when someone you love dies. Do you know what I’m saying?

Yes, I think the disciples were like we are when we encounter life’s difficulties. Even today, I’m going to guess there are some here in the sanctuary who are transfixed right now by things that happened to us yesterday. The past has got us snagged.

Annie Dillard in her Pulitzer Prize winning book “Pilgrim At Tinker Creek” reflects on this tendency of human beings to look backwards – she describes it as downstream - at all the things that have flowed away from us. Relationships – our youth – good health – so often we find ourselves gazing down the creek (so to speak) where so much of life has floated downstream.

But, says Annie Dillard, “There must be something wrong with a creekside person who, all things being equal, chooses to face downstream. It’s like fouling your own nest. …Tinker Creek doesn’t back up, pushed up its own craw, from the Roanoke River; it flows down, easing, from the northern unseen side of Tinker Mountain.”

Dillard observes that what is needed to heal our lives and memories is to dare to turn around and look upstream! Yes, some of life is always flowing away. That’s how life is – like the babbling waters of a brook. But turn around and you begin to see that more of life is always coming at you! You see, life – like a stream – is dynamic and not static. As some of it passes away from you and out of view, more of it is flowing your way. Turn around and look upstream! HERE IT COMES!…the future!

Last Sunday, as I bore around my shoulders the weight of worry about my mom, I happened to be at a theater where my son and daughter-in-law were in the process of putting on a dance recital. The place was a humdrum of activity and I snuck away into a side room where my grandson Ryan was being cared for by Melissa’s mother. It was relatively quiet there, and I could lose myself in all the worrisome thoughts about what might happen with my mom. And as I contemplated those fearful ideas, I happened to look up, and do you know what happened?

I saw my grandson take his very first steps!

Can you imagine that? How good God was to give me that precious gift in that particular moment! It just flowed into my life as an unexpected grace. And I would have missed it if I hadn’t looked up!

Look upstream because new life is always coming to you. God loves you so much that He is constantly replenishing your life, and if you can learn to trust God with that, you’ll find new life, and power for dealing in healthy ways even with your losses.

To be a Christian is to trust God to fill your today with the beauty of life! It is a constant turning toward God to receive and appreciate the new day, and to trust God that all will be well. That’s part of what it means to ride the wind.

Now, a second thing that happened to the disciples when the wind began to blow is that they were moved from inside to outside, and from themselves to others. When the story starts, they’re hiding in a room licking their own wounds. When the story ends, they’re out in the city sharing the good news of Jesus and binding the wounds of others! When the story begins, there are 120 of them in number. When the story ends that day, they’ve added 3,000 members to the church! Talk about seating problems!

I believe that one of the great dangers in the Christian life is the temptation to so over personalize our faith that it becomes our possession rather than a gift to be shared with others. I remember a woman who became very upset when, on a Youth Sunday, the kids used a modern language version of The Lord’s Prayer. She blew into the office the next day and angrily confronted us. “What have you done to MY Lord’s Prayer?” Hmmm. Her Lord’s Prayer. When did it become hers? My worship service? When did it become mine? Our church? When did it become ours? Oh, its tempting to think of our faith and the Church as things that exist primarily for ourselves. And it’s tragic when we so personalize it that we turn the Church into a hotel for saints rather than a hospital intended to reach out to sinners, and to strangers, and to other hurting people.

Tom Long tells the story of the little Presbyterian church in South Carolina where he grew up. The people came up with an ingenious way of keeping black people out. This was back in the days of the Civil Rights movement. Even though no one in that church would come right out and say they didn’t want blacks to come – after all, that wouldn’t sound very Christian – they managed to come up with a technicality that would get the job done. Every seat was filled every Sunday, so they created a rule that said that, in keeping with the building code, everyone would be welcome to their services so long as there were seats available! Pretty clever, huh?

But at the church meeting when the rule was proposed, the wind of the Spirit blew. One little old lady stood up and said, “Yes, we must abide by the building code. So I just want everyone to know that, if some of those black folks come to this church and there ain’t no empty seats…they can have MY seat!” And in many such ways, Christian people in both north and south in those days rode the wind of the Holy Spirit….and opened their churches to everyone.

Riding the wind means getting outside of ourselves and reaching out to others! And it is such and exciting and challenging thing! When people and churches dare to do it, only then do they begin to fathom the tremendous impact their lives can have for good in the world!

In the weeks following my father’s death many years ago, my mother received in the mail a note from a couple with whom my dad had stayed while attending a planning meeting at a church in a nearby state. The note said that my father had never known the power of his words when he stayed at their house. You see, their lives were a mess and their marriage crumbling. They had already made the decision to divorce. But first they had to hold things together long enough to get this hospitality obligation out of the way. One night as they were chatting with my dad before bed, the subject of faith came up in a very natural way. And he – in his very simple, layman’s way – shared with them about what a difference the Lord had made in his and my mother’s marriage, and in our family. He didn’t know anything about their situation. He just told the story of the difference faith made in his life.

He never knew it, but that night God touched that couple’s heart. When they went to bed, they prayed together for the first time ever and asked God to help them. Maybe the Lord could help them as He’d helped my dad. More than a year later, through a lot of prayer, and marriage counseling, and looking toward the future, they were still together – and growing in love and faith!

“We just wanted you to know what a miracle Marty was for us,” they wrote.

Could you be someone’s miracle? Do you have any idea of the kind of positive impact your life can have on this world? And what about our church? How many people do you think we can reach over the next fifteen years with the Good News of Jesus Christ?

Oh, it will take riding the wind from inside to outside, and from ourselves to others. It will take forgetting entirely about ever becoming a hotel for saints, and a true commitment to becoming a hospital for sinners, and strangers, and other people God loves!

So we ride the wind of the Spirit by turning to the future and receiving it as a gift. We ride the wind by reaching out beyond ourselves and extending the reach of God’s love to others. And finally, we can ride the wind by looking for Medes and Elamites.

Did you catch that part of the story in Acts 2?

Why, when the wind began to blow on Pentecost Sunday, there was such a commotion that people rushed to the house to see what was going on. There were many pilgrims in Jerusalem from all over the world, and each one heard the disciples telling the wonders of God in their own tongue! And Luke tells us there were Mesopotamians, and Judeans, and Cappadocians, and Asians, and Egyptians…and… Medes and Elamites!

Do you understand what an amazing thing it is that Medes and Elamites are included in that list? Why, there hadn’t been any Medes in the world for hundreds of years at that point. They were as extinct as Mastodons! And Elamites? Why, they were a people from way back in Old Testament times! Why do you suppose Luke included Medes and Elamites in his list of the people present at Pentecost? Maybe it was Luke’s way of saying, “Don’t ever give up on anyone!”

One of the most destructive and faithless things we do as Christians and as the Church is to write people off. Reacting to the sin we see in them, or their doubt, or the ways they hurt and disappoint us, we characterize them as people who are beyond God’s reach. All you need do is turn to one of the religious channels on television to hear about this one or that one, this group or that group, who are under God’s judgment and headed for hell in a handbasket.

This is not the Christian Faith.

The Christian Faith calls us to see hope in every person, and to see God’s grace at work in every corner of life. And the problem with assigning other people to hell is that, the moment you do, you’ll begin to find ways to give up on them, to stop loving them, to stop reaching out to them. What the Bible asks us to do is to leave judgment to God. For when we do that, we can get on with the business of loving others, and extending the reach of God’s love – no matter how sinful or lost people may seem to be.

Medes and Elamites! Can you imagine that? Why, we’d given up on those folks long ago! But here at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit leads us to them.

Talk about riding the wind!

Are you willing to give it a try? Let the Spirit help you turn to the future so that you can receive all the new gifts of life God pours out to you every day! Let the Spirit move you outward where you can discover the tremendous positive impact your life can have on others! And let the Spirit give you hope for the world – and the resolve to never give up on anyone!

What an amazing thing, when the wind of the Spirit begins to blow! I hope you’ll go this week, and dare to ride the wind!