The Community of the Re-Storied--May 28, 2026

The Community of the Re-Storied--May 28, 2026

"Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12:3)

Let's clear something up: treating Jesus like your mascot or personal possession is easy. It's cheap. It's popular. And anybody can do that. They can even dress it up in the language of piety to sound deeply devout--but it's still about trying to use Jesus to endorse your own agenda. And, to be even more honest [perhaps uncomfortably so], it's a really common thing to do, even among Respectable Religious folk.

But to make the claim that Jesus is "Lord"--well, that's really saying something. Or at least to mean that claim, rather than just mouthing it as pious lip-service or reciting a creed from memory like a parrot that doesn't understand the sounds it has been trained to mimic, that's a big deal. To name Jesus as Lord isn't about invoking Jesus' power or status to back up our own agendas, but rather it is about declaring our allegiance to his agenda. And that is something that we need the Spirit's help to do--on our own, we keep trying to crown ourselves sovereigns over our own lives like Napoleon. It takes the pull of the Spirit in our lives to redirect our hearts and hands to give our allegiance to Jesus and his upside-down Reign where the last are first and the lowly are lifted up.

That was certainly even more evident in the first century when Paul first wrote these words that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. We have become so familiar with the phrase "Jesus is Lord," and we can so callously utter them without consequence in our lives, that we might well miss just how radical a claim it really is to confess Jesus as Lord--if we dare to take that claim seriously. In Paul's world, it was as stark a statement as saying that up is down or day is night. It was as risky--and counter-cultural--a claim as Copernicus saying that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the accepted conventional wisdom [insisted on by the Keepers of Respectable Religion in his day, mind you] that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun and all the planets orbiting it. To say that Jesus was and is "Lord" was a clear rejection of the Empire's claim that Caesar was Lord--in fact, it was that very statement that the Empire demanded its subjects, including Christians, affirm. And it was that very claim that ancient Christians refused to endorse--they would not mouth the words, "Caesar is Lord" or offer even a pinch of incense to Caesar on an imperial altar, even though that defiance cost many Christians their lives. From Paul's perspective, nobody just glibly said "Jesus is Lord," because everybody in his world knew that saying those words risked a death sentence--and nobody gambles with their life so recklessly if they don't really believe the words they are saying. [To borrow an insight of C.S. Lewis, while plenty of people in history have died for things they believed in that turned out to be incorrect or outright lies, nobody dies for a lie that they know is a lie.]

For that matter, even to people who weren't big fans of the Empire, it looked simply absurd to claim that a man who had been crucified by the Empire was actually the Lord of the universe. To the watching world, it seemed obvious that whoever is doing the crucifying is really in charge, and whoever is getting crucified must be weak, foolish, and defeated. But Christians, from the very beginning, made the outrageous claim, not only that Jesus was and is the true Lord of all, but that his way of accomplishing victory and establishing his Reign was precisely at the point that looked like an utter loss: the cross. Nobody says something like that by logical deduction. Nobody, at least not in Paul's time, makes a claim like that because it is popular. Nobody who heard the story of a homeless, weaponless rabbi getting executed on Caesar's orders would have said, "That's predictable. It sounds exactly like the rabbi won and the Empire lost"--well, nobody except someone who had been given the eyes to recognize it by the Spirit of God.

That's actually what Paul had said back in the very first chapter of this same letter (see First Corinthians 1:18 and following). The message about the cross sounds like weakness and foolishness--utter nonsense!--to the watching world, but to those who have been called by God and given the eyes of faith to recognize it, we see in the cross the power and wisdom of God. By sheer logic, conventional wisdom, and "common sense," it looks like Jesus is a loser who got crushed by the powers of the day, but by the direction of the Spirit, we can see a completely different understanding: that the Crucified One is indeed the Lord of all creation, and his way of reigning is the power of self-giving love that was willing to be killed by his enemies [and for their sake] rather than to kill them.

In a sense, that means being a part of the Christian family means being "re-storied." To be a Christian is to learn to tell a different story from what the rest of the world tells--about Jesus, about true power, about the world, and about who is really Lord. Emperors like Caesar are so insecure about themselves and their legacies that they need to build monuments and stage gladiator fights to try and convince people they are powerful.  The Spirit shows us that Jesus is Lord from a cross. They are two totally different stories. To a world that just keeps rehashing the same old tale of "Might makes right," and "You've got to look out for your own interests first," the story we call the gospel sounds ridiculous. But we have been shown by the very Spirit of God a different story--one in which the loser turns out to be the victor, the cross turns out to be Jesus' triumph, and the powers of the day are exposed to be empty husks.

In our time, the trouble is that church folks have gotten so used to reciting the phrase, "Jesus is Lord" that we run the risk of forgetting how radical a notion that really is. We keep wanting to take the title "Lord Jesus" and slap it on our same old notions of power, and Respectable Religious folks keep wanting to let Jesus get co-opted to prop up their political agendas [often to support things that don't sound very Christ-like, at that], or to pretend that Jesus blesses our selfishness. But when Paul talks about confessing "Jesus is Lord," he doesn't mean just reciting those words as an empty slogan or magic words to guarantee we will get what we want or have divine endorsement on our power-grabs. The only way to really mean "Jesus is Lord" is to recognize that the One you are calling "Lord" is the One who laid down his life and endured execution by the Superpower of his day, and that his kind of lordship doesn't look like imperial conquests but the washing of feet, the welcoming of outcasts, and the love of his enemies. Jesus' lordship doesn't come at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun, but with a towel and basin and nail-scarred hands. The only way anybody can possibly see such an outlandish claim as the God's-honest truth is if the Spirit of God shows it to us. When it finally clicks for us that this surprising claim is the truth, we'll realize that the Spirit has brought us into the Community of the Re-Storied at last.

Today, then, let's be done with the cheap ways we try to misuse the name of Jesus on our own personal or partisan agendas. Let's be done with using Jesus as a mascot to endorse our own wishes for control, money, or status, and instead allow Jesus' upside-down reign to surprise the world, ourselves included.

In other words, let us dare to confess that Jesus is Lord... and let us dare to mean it.

Lord Jesus, let us mean what we say about you in the ways we live this life according to your upside-down Reign where the last are put first and the lowly are lifted up.

New Eyes for a New World--May 27, 2026

New Eyes for a New World--May 27, 2026

[Peter said to the crowd in Jerusalem:] "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even on my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved'." (Acts 2:14b-21)

It's like a whole world ending... and a whole new one coming to life.

That may sound overly dramatic to our ears. But in all honesty, if we take seriously what the Reign of God in Jesus is all about, it will sound to us like the ending and the beginning of a whole new world, a whole new order of things. And once you are cued in on the new thing that God's Spirit is up to in the world, you cannot help but see things differently--like you are living at the overlap of the ends of the ages.... like the whole world is being made new.

Peter gets that.

In fact, what our narrator Luke gives us here as Peter's off-the-cuff speech on the day of Pentecost is all about seeing the ending of an old world order and the beginning of a whole new creation... right in the midst of the world looking like it always had. These words of Peter's, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, are framed as Peter's response to the confused crowds in Jerusalem after the Spirit had been poured out on the followers of Jesus to gather in people from all languages and nations, all customs and cultures (yes, side note, that is always how the community of Jesus has been intended to look--it was multilingual and multinational from Day One).

And as Pete sees that happening, as he hears the different languages, as he sees visitors from foreign nations all across the empire coming to hear the Good News of Jesus, he sees that this is what God had been promising all along. And Peter finally understands that even the ancient prophets of old looked ahead to a day when God would act to welcome all, to send he Spirit on all sorts of surprising folks, and to change the vision of people in unexpected places from unexpected corners.

This passage from Acts, as you might be able to tell, is largely Peter quoting from the prophet Joel, and Joel himself had been describing some future moment he calls "the Day of the Lord." And at least on Joel's lips, that sounds at first blush like a scary moment. The sun goes dark, the moon goes blood red--it's like the most solid, most constant things you could think of in the ancient world all suddenly get wobbly. And Joel sees these as going hand in hand with the moment when God pours out the Spirit "on all flesh." Men and women. Old and young. Rich and poor. Even those still caught under the wheel of slavery. All people, not just a select few, or the priests, or the religious professionals. As Joel saw it, when God would do something like that, it would feel like the whole tired mess of the old world was coming to an end, and a whole new creation was being born.

Now flash forward about... oh, maybe seven hundred years, and there is Simon Peter watching the Spirit rush through his previously scaredy-cat friends (we usually call them "the Apostles," but come on, until this moment, they were all pretty cowardly when push came to shove). And Peter sees the way even these uneducated fisherman, ex-revolutionaries and former tax collectors are given the presence of the Spirit and the ability for others to understand their words in many languages. And Peter realizes that this is what it looks like when God sends the Spirit--everybody is welcomed. Everybody in their own language. Everybody as they are. And Peter says, in effect, "This is what Joel was talking about! This is it happening before your very eyes!" even if, to everybody else's eyes, it was just an ordinary Sunday morning at 9:00am.

It's funny to me: Peter has no problem seeing this moment, with the many languages and the wind of the Spirit rushing through them, as the fulfillment of Joel's vision--even though there are none of the scary signs that Joel had talked about. No sun into darkness--not even a partial eclipse. No red moon. No blood or fire. Not even a whiff of "smoky mist." None of the scary celestial signs or astronomical anomalies happened that day--but still Peter is convinced that this is what Joel was talking about all along. (This is perhaps a warning to us about how we read the prophets ourselves--sometimes religious folks want to turn the prophets into fortune tellers or Nostradamus-types, but they are just as often poets who are describing touchable, tangible human events with the startling language they need to use to get people's attention.) Peter sees that the coming of the Spirit really is like the ending of an old, tired, and miserable regime and the beginning of something new, like the whole world was born all over again.

And maybe even Peter himself doesn't quite grasp yet just how radical a moment this is. But it won't be long in the book of Acts before God uses this same Peter to reach out even wider to include and welcome outsiders, Gentiles, and even members of the enemy occupying army (like Cornelius the centurion, to whom Peter will be sent soon in the book of Acts). Peter is witnessing the creation of a whole new way of being human--one that is no longer bound up with separate ethnicities or exclusion based on language. He sees that God is creating a new kind of community based on the grip of grace, not on our DNA. And that floors him. That is like the end of a world and the start of a new humanity. Peter says, "That's what Joel was getting at all along." Peter took his Bible seriously... but he was able to see that Joel was less interested in predicting eclipses as he was in envisioning God's Reign breaking in.

We have a way sometimes of missing the boat, we Christians. (Surprise, surprise, right?) We have a way of not being able to see the forest for the trees when it comes to the words of these ancient poets and dreamers we call the prophets. Instead of trying to sift through their visions looking for clues about the "end times" or trying to tie in yesterday's eclipse with some ancient scripture passage, perhaps we could listen the way Peter did--to see that the real end-of-the-world moment was also the beginning of a whole new creation, the inauguration of the Spirit-led movement of the followers of Jesus. So often, we stifle and squelch what God has been trying to do--we end up further dividing ourselves, and acting like the old lines of language, nationality, and culture still must divide us, like the old allegiances still claim us. So often we accept those as givens, while trying to figure out what astronomical signs some old prophet was trying to predict. Instead, we ought to be hearing the prophets tell us together that God is doing a new thing--a thing meant for all, for me... for you... and for people you don't particularly like, too.

If we listen to Peter there on the day of Pentecost, we will find our eyes are changed. We will begin to see, with him, how God has begun a new creation right in the midst of the old order. We will see that God has breathed a new breath into the universe, and just like the Spirit brooded over the waters at creation, now the same God has breathed the Spirit onto the motley crew that makes up the Kingdom. We will see, as we look at how varied the faces, how different the voices, how many the languages and cultures and customs of people who are being gathered into God's New Thing. We will see that the old way of living in the world--divided and segregated and isolated from one another, viewing the other with suspicion and fear--is coming to an end. We will see that God has begun a new order of the day, and it is taking shape among us right now... right here... right before our very eyes.

That's what Peter says we are offered as well: new eyes to see a new world unfolding now.  That's what the Spirit gives among us, too--the gift of a new way of seeing that changes everything and includes everyone. We will get to see signs that God is doing something new and wonderful ... and then we will get to be a part of it, too.

Great God, do your new thing among us, and help us to see it.

A People from Everywhere--May 26, 2026

A People from Everywhere--May 26, 2026

Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” (Acts 2:5-11)

It would have been almost certainly easier if things had been kept in a single language, rather than God's miraculous choice to enable this cosmopolitan crowd to hear the news of Jesus in their own native languages.  But God has never been one to just pick the easy way.  Rather, God has always had a thing for doing things with extravagant love, even when that meant doing something much more complicated and difficult.

These verses from the familiar story of Pentecost, which many of us heard this past Sunday, give us a glimpse of that choice of God's from the very beginning of the community called "church." As it happened, a large crowd of religious pilgrims had come back to the city of Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost (also called the festival of "Shauvot" or the Feast of Weeks), and they had come from all over the Mediterranean and near Eastern world. After centuries of the Jewish people being scattered throughout various kingdoms and empires, they had made lives and homes in other territories but kept their Jewish identity, faith, and worship.  So these people had grown up speaking a whole host of various languages from the places where they had settled--the list here in this passage is pretty lengthy, with more than a dozen people groups and ethnicities represented.  

And if God's intention is to get all of these people to be able to hear the news of Jesus and understand it as they go back home to their families, neighborhoods, and communities, God has two choices, you could say.  One option would be to miraculously give everybody the ability to hear and understand one language--say, the Aramaic that Simon Peter and the other disciples would have grown up speaking.  That would have made things nice and simple, and from then on the whole church could have insisted on a single language for uniformity and consistency. They could have said, "Anybody is welcome to be a Christ-follower, but first you have to learn Aramaic, because that's what the first disciples spoke." Or, the more complicated option would have been to enable everyone to hear in their own native language, somehow, presumably with attention to all the nuances, idioms, and quirks of each language. This seems like it would have set up a messier precedent, because it would have opened the doors to saying that the Good News of Jesus could be translated into any language and could be understood by anybody without making them learn a single common language first.  And from there, the church would have had to find ways to accommodate not just the languages, but the cultures, the backgrounds, the foods, and the complexions of people from all over.  And yet, as you and I well know, this is the choice God makes.  God deliberately brings about a miracle that meets everybody where they are, speaking their own language rather than insisting that they all learn one chosen language first in order to belong.  And God does that, I am convinced, because that's the nature of the Gospel: God meets us as we are, where we are, in order to make us a part of a people from everywhere.

And so here we are, twenty centuries later, worshiping, singing, praying, studying, and talking about the news of Jesus in English--a language that didn't even exist in the first century!--while other Christians in other places speak their own languages, too. Our belonging, and our acceptance, just as we are, comes from God's choice in this moment.  Our favorite hymns, and the cadences of our favorite Bible verses as we memorized them once upon a time, they are included in the praise of the church because from this critical moment onward, God did not impose a language requirement on the followers of Jesus.  Sometimes that choice makes things more complicated for us--just see what happens when you get two different translations side by side at a Bible study, for example.  But from God's vantage point, that's the beauty of the whole thing: God would rather be committed to the difficult work of finding ways to reach everybody than to just take the easy way out of requiring that we all learn Aramaic, or Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, first.  For the sake of reaching everybody, God chooses to set the precedent with all the languages of the Day of Pentecost.

This is the kind of community we belong to as the church. We aren't just the local County Historical Society that retells the events of our particular piece of ground.  We aren't just a religious version of your high school Spanish Club or French Club, either, focused on a single language and culture.  We are a people from everywhere, and there is room for each of us because God insists there is room for all of us.

How might that affect the way we see others whose stories, cultures, and languages are different from our own?  How might it change the way we see our own belonging here in the church?

Let's see how our witness might be widened today because of God's choice to speak in every language and meet people where they are.

Lord Jesus, send us out with your wide vision of love for all people as you have first reached out to us.

Ever-Widening Circles--May 25, 2026

Ever-Widening Circles--May 25, 2026

"When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." (Acts 2:1-4)

Something like three billion years ago, something amazing happened that just made the news in our lifetimes.

Maybe you caught the first news story a few years ago when for just scientists first observed gravitational waves, which are ripples in the very fabric of space-time itself. It was headline news when these discoveries were first measured about ten years ago, and ever since they've been finding these waves--about three hundred instances since the first discovery around 2015.  Einstein had predicted that such things would exist as part of working out the theory of relativity, but it was a hundred years later before scientists at the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) had developed an instrument sensitive enough to pick them up. And that's because ripples in the fabric of reality itself are only caused by really really really big cataclysmic type events... but those events happen very very very far away from us making the ripples dissipate the further they travel (picture circular ripples in a pond).

Well, here's what they observed: somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion light-years away, two black holes (each one already a giant, voracious mass whose gravity is so strong that even light itself cannot escape it) collided with each other. First, they approached each other in a sort of swirling motion, circling each other like sharks in the water, or like dancers doing the tango. And then, after getting closer and closer and closer to each other--bang!--they collided and formed a new, even larger black hole. (And if the scientists' math is anywhere near the right ballpark, in that instant, twice the amount of all the matter in our Sun was converted to energy, a blast so powerful that, well... it literally shook the fabric of reality.

And this is the cool part for us here on earth. These really really smart scientists figured out how to build a machine (well, actually two of them, one in Washington State and one in Louisiana) that could actually measure a ripple--tiny, by the time it reached us all these billions of light-years away--in the space-time continuum. Wow. Just... wow.

Ok, so let's pause for a moment and get the non-jargon version of what happened. An event happened a long, long time ago, releasing immense (like mind bogglingly big) amounts of energy and setting off waves of motion throughout the cosmos. They kept radiating. The motion kept expanding. Ever wider. Ever further. Across interstellar--intergalactic--distances of cold, largely empty space. Where there was nothing but space, space itself rippled, and carried the energy from that first flash. And now... after all this time, and all that distance, the waves from that collision--met us. Us, here. On this lovely little blue planet of ours. We are now experiencing the same motion, the same waves, the same momentum, that began from one event all that time and all those impossibly large distances away. But now, it has reached us and we can see it here.  Those who have eyes to see it now (like scientists with these special detectors) can still see it happening all around us, in fact.

I want to suggest that what happened on the day of Pentecost was something like that. Here were these fearful, confused, withdrawn barely educated fishermen and their friends, all huddled together in one room, still afraid of what scary things might happen to them if they took a step outside the confines of those four walls. And then, the Spirit comes. And in an instant, light. Energy. Fire. Passion. Vision. Direction. Movement. And from that instant, these women and men were changed. The world didn't all of a sudden change. The world didn't stop being a scary, possibly dangerous place. But these disciples are changed--they are given a borrowed courage to see things wider, bigger, further out and including more and more and more... all the way to the ends of the earth. A movement began that day. It began to ripple out like circles on a pond, or really more like gravitational waves in the fabric of the universe itself.

Something changed them. Before the Spirit's outpouring, these folks were generally pretty thick-headed, fickle-faithed, and kept making the mistake of assuming Jesus was picking the right moment to raise up an army and make himself king. Before the Spirit's outpouring, these disciples had heard Jesus' teaching and maybe even seen Jesus' kind of love in action, but they weren't very good (or maybe not brave enough yet) at practicing it themselves. They keep wanting to limit it to the well-behaved, the reasonable, the folks who seemed enough "like" them... and Jesus had kept telling them, "No, always bigger... always wider... always reaching out to all people." But all the color commentary in the world wasn't going to change them. They needed to get swept along in the motion of a wave--in the power and presence of the Spirit who first brooded over the rippling waters of chaos at creation.

And from that instant, the movement has been going on. It included all the language groups visiting there in the city of Jerusalem on that day of Pentecost... but before long, it was spilling out into the surrounding area of Judea... and then beyond that to the "hostile territory" of Samaria... and then across the whole Roman Empire. And now you and I are a part of that motion, too. You and I are part of it. It is all the same wave--it has just gotten a lot bigger over time.

That's what I want to invite you to picture as the story of these two thousand years of the church's life story--it is the story of a wave rippling out in ever-widening circles. And it goes back to the original moment of explosion--the pouring out of the Spirit "on all flesh" as the old prophet imagined it. What began at Pentecost did not stop with the end of the book of Acts, or the closing of the first century. It didn't stop when Rome fell, or when the Renaissance began. It wasn't over when a young Augustinian monk nailed a list of debate topics to the local church door in the year 1517. It wasn't stopped amidst all the crises of religion and science and belief and evidence and reason in the last few centuries. It hasn't stopped, even though there are plenty of angry religious voices round all bemoaning the end of Christianity, or warning us to fight others with violence in some kind of clash of civilizations. The ripples aren't stopped by other events or other the vast coldness of human hearts. The motion continues. The movement is still happening.

And you and I are being swept up in it. We don't simply gather on Sundays to rehearse the good old days when God "used to" do things. We don't simply leave the boundaries where they were yesterday--because the motion of the Spirit is, like a gravitational wave, always outward, always wider, always including and reaching out further to embrace all. To be a Christian--well, to be a follower of Christ who is carried along by the Spirit of that same Christ, at any rate--is to be caught up in a wave that began long ago and is rippling out in a bigger and bigger circle, and to let the motion of the Spirit move the boundaries out wider and wider, moment by moment.

What will it look like today for you and me to be swept up in the motion of the same Spirit today? Where will we be sent? How will the Spirit end up surprising us with a love and a reach that is bigger than we dared to imagine?

Lord God, as your waves of mercy reach us from across all those centuries and miles, let us be caught up in your movement and join you in reaching out further and further to include all in your love.

Real Faces Gathered--May 22, 2026

Real Faces Gathered--May 22, 2026

"Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers." (Acts 1:12-14)

It's like the calm before the storm... the silence of the orchestra before the conductor's first flick of the baton... the waiting between contractions in the delivery room.  The community of Jesus' followers is in this curious in-between place in these few verses which conclude the story many of us heard this past Sunday, between the ascension of Jesus into heaven and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost ten days later. They are waiting for something, but they are not quite sure what it will look like when it happens. They are holding onto Jesus' promise that somehow they'll know it when they see it, and in the mean time, they are holding on to one another.

This is one of the details it's easy to overlook. We are so quick to focus on the big moments of action with supernatural special effects--the cloud carrying Jesus up to heaven, the rush of the wind and dazzling flames over the apostles' heads, the sound of people speaking in many languages--that we might not even give a second's thought to the way Luke has rattled off a list of names and mentioned that they stayed together in prayer while they waited for The Next Big Thing.  But I think there is something really important about what's said here. In those in-between times of life, the thing that keeps us going is being together as the Christian community, as the family of Jesus.  We keep gathering with each other, and we keep allowing ourselves to be re-centered and re-focused in prayer, so that when the next moment for stepping up in action comes, we will be ready to respond.  And we find strength from being in the company of other real faces gathered and intentionally oriented to listen for God.

In other words, the first Christian community knew that it was more important to stick with each other and to stick together for each other than to each go home alone by themselves and wait in isolation for whatever Jesus meant by the "coming of the Holy Spirit." They didn't all just walk off in different directions.  They didn't say to each other, "Well, I guess our work here is done--see you in heaven, everybody!  Have a good life until then!" They stuck with each other, supporting each other, even when there wasn't a project to be done, a trip to be taken, or a goal to be achieved yet.  Those moments would come soon enough--they would go on great voyages to spread the gospel, they would collect resources to feed the hungry in the community, and they would discuss important issues together.  The whole book of Acts is full of those Big Actions, Major Projects, and Important Decisions.  But in order to be ready for the next prompting of the Spirit--"Go here..." "Talk to that person..." "Do this..." and in order to be able to recognize when the nudge they are feeling is the Spirit of God rather than their own gut impulses or personal agendas, they need to be together, listening, praying, and sharing insights with one another.  The first followers of Jesus knew that they needed to be with each other, not just for the climactic moments of history, but for the ordinary daily routines of life, which are the times that form the kind of people we are in the big decisive moments. We do the same because we are being formed still in the same way--together.

That's so important to take seriously. In a culture and a time when so many things are marketed to us as hyper-individualized experiences, the Christian life is decidedly communal. In a time when it is easy to just watch life from my own personal screen, the Christian community deliberately gathers together with one another to be shaped in Christ's likeness together.  In a time when folks are increasingly turning to AI-powered computer chatbots for a facsimile of human conversation, we find ourselves drawn, almost as if by gravity, to real faces of real people.  It is sometimes tempting to imagine that the Christian faith is just about "Me and Jesus," but Luke reminds us here that it always includes a whole family of believers with real faces, stories, and names--like Peter and James and John and Mary... and you and me.

Today may not bring obviously huge turning point moments in your life (although you never know), but it does bring the chance to be shaped more fully in the likeness of Christ, to be guided by the direction of the Spirit, and to be strengthened by the presence and witness of other disciples.  That's why we still keep gathering together--this is the family in which grow to maturity.

Lord Jesus, keep bringing us back to the gathered community of your family, among whom we see your face reflected in the faces of others.

Home At Last-May 21, 2026

Home At Last-May 21, 2026

[Jesus said to the disciples:] "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:9-11)

There is a routine in my household just about every weekday morning, and I bet you have experienced something similar. It goes something like this. With lunches packed and travel mugs of coffee poured (one iced, one hot), the four members of our household head out, by school bus or by car, to school, to work, and to the church, each to our own tasks for the day, all of us knowing we'll be back in the house by the end of the day.  There are no teary-eyed goodbyes, no anxious exits, and no dramatic scenes over the morning commute (typically), because we all know we will be back home after each of us has done what is ours to do for the day. We will be apart for a while, but we will be back home soon enough. And that assurance is what enables each person in the family to do their thing for the day.  You have lived through some version of that morning send-off, too, I expect.

In a way, this scene from the first chapter of the book of Acts has a similar feel to it. Maybe you noticed that, too, if you heard this story as many of us did back on this past Sunday.  At first blush, this story seems like a farewell, and a pretty final-sounding one at first. Jesus, having been raised from the dead forty days before on Easter, is now ascending to heaven; as Jesus had told his disciples back on the night in the upper room, "Where I am going, you cannot come." Jesus vanishes from their sight enfolded in clouds, and the disciples are left staring up at the sky. Meanwhile, they have been given a mission of their own, too: they will be sent to "Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" from that spot on the mountain together. Or as Matthew's telling puts it, "Go into all nations and make disciples..." In other words, everybody left that mountaintop scene pointed in different directions--Jesus, heavenward, and the rest of the disciples getting psyched up to go out to every point on the map.  Staying together on the summit was not a choice for any of them.

And yet, you don't get the sense that this is meant to be a sorrowful scene of final farewells.  Even the angelic messengers who show up frame the moment with a sort of "What are you doing still moping around here?" expression.  They don't feel the need to offer comfort in the moment, but just give the matter-of-fact reminder that Jesus will come again.  And, after all, the disciples have work to do of their own in the mean-time, anyway. In other words, this isn't a goodbye forever; this is closer to the morning routine while everyone goes about their tasks.  This isn't a parting for which there will be no reunion--this is the start of the workday, at the end of which everyone will be gathered back home at the last.  Like your family members heading out to school, to errands, or to work in the morning, all looking forward to being back under the same roof before the sun sets, Jesus and his followers are assured that they will be gathered back together in due time. They are, after all, a family, and eventually everyone in the family will find their way back home.

If we see the story this way, then there is deep hope for us every day.  We are not abandoned to fend for ourselves in a dangerous world without God. The ascension of Jesus  to heaven while the disciples are sent to be witnesses on earth is more like the morning routine in which each member of the family goes about their work in the confident hope of homecoming at the last. Each of us has a calling in this day, this life--to embody the Jesus way of life, to witness to his love and welcome, and to draw others into the disciple community as well. But we do that work in hope that at the right time, our labors will be ended, and we will find ourselves reunited with Jesus and the rest of the whole family.  We are not doomed to be Sisyphus from the Greek myth, forced to push the boulder up the hill every day, only to have it roll back down each evening and to be repeated forever, endlessly. And we are not scattered into the world alone, either, with no hope of homecoming.  We do the work to which we are called today, and for as long as it is ours to do it, but with the assurance that we will be welcomed back to the family table in time for supper. Like family members headed out of the house to school and work and their list of errands, we know there is a return trip in store that will find us back with one another when the time is right.

That changes how we face each day, doesn't it?  And it means that the story of Jesus' ascension is not an ending, but a beginning of sorts.  An adventure has begun, and you and I are a part of it.  And when the time for coming back to the house arrives, we will catch each other up on all the things we have done with our time, our energy, and our love. And we will know we are home at last.

Lord Jesus, give us hope as we face this day so that we can do the work to which you have called us, until you gather us in your presence back home.

These Dense Disciples--May 20, 2026

These Dense Disciples--May 20, 2026

So when they had come together, they asked [Jesus], “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority…” (Acts 1:6-7)

To me it is always reassuring to see that even the hand-picked followers of Jesus didn't "get it," and that he was willing not to hold that against them. 

It's not that I like to gloat in the failures of others, but rather that it says there is hope for me, someone who so often doesn't "get it" either. This is one of those moments. Here are the apostles whom Jesus is about to send out into the whole world with the news of God's Reign and of the resurrection of Jesus, and they still miss the point of what Jesus is all about. It would be enough to make me worry, if I were Jesus, whether I was making a wise move leaving the movement in the hands of these largely thick-headed followers.

What's the issue? Well, the disciples have seen Jesus throughout his whole ministry, and not once did Jesus indicate that he was about to overthrow the Romans in a violent revolt,  stage a coup against Herod, take the crown for himself, build an army for God, "take back their country for the Lord," or even impress people with his own glorious power. And beyond that, they have heard Jesus say that the way he would bring about the kingdom was through his death and resurrection, not in spite of it. But the disciples just want everyone else to see that they backed a winner—that they bet on the right horse. The disciples want Jesus to show power as they know power and kingdoms as they know kingdoms, and they are thinking that maybe now, this is their moment to "restore the kingdom to Israel." Now, they think, they'll get their rewards. Now, they'll get their heavenly prizes. Now, they'll get… and then they fill in the blank with their wildest dreams.

Or, maybe they won't get those things, after all, because Jesus just isn't interested in declaring a war of armies with Rome. And Jesus isn't interested in making himself a king like Herod or a governor like Pilate. Jesus has bigger fish to fry—but the way Jesus will go about his work will not look like it is very impressive at all. He is about to leave the work of the Kingdom in the hands of these same former fishermen and tax collectors who just don't get it for so much of the time. No, Peter, there will be no Inaugural Ball. No, James and John, there will be no fire or lightning called down from the sky to show people who's boss. No, Matthew and Andrew, we will not be marching our soldiers and parading our tanks down the streets to strike fear in the heart of our enemies. No, we will let the when and the how and the where of the Kingdom of God be left in the hands of God. God will reign over all things when all is said and done, Jesus seems to say, but it will be on God's terms, not ours. And God seems surprisingly crafty at picking the terms that we least expect—and even that most offend us.

Jesus just isn't interested in "taking his country back for God" with weapons and wealth, but instead inaugurates God's Reign in the self-giving love of a cross and empty tomb. And now, despite the fact that his followers still don't get it, he entrusts them--including us!--to embody that Reign by speaking the truth, welcoming the left out, and healing the broken. Peter and the gang have been tempted to envision a swelling army in shiny armor and flaming angel swords, and Jesus has in mind something closer to the Island of Misfit Toys. No, children, it's not up to you to tell God how or when or where to "restore the Kingdom." It is all so much intriguing, if also comically misguided, theorizing from these disciples. If they'd have been listening to Jesus at all up to this point, they might have even heard the strange-sounding news that the Kingdom was already breaking out among them like a holy rash.

And yet... it is precisely among these trigger-happy, foot-in-mouthed disciples who seem like failures for a fair amount of the time that Jesus knows the Spirit will come. He doesn't hold back their past [or present] misunderstandings against them, but chooses still to work with this dense bunch of disicples. Despite the fact that they disappoint at every turn—and in truth, so do we—Jesus does not think it's too much work for the Spirit to handle. As much as it is hard for us to be the waiting ones in life, when the word from Jesus is to be patient. But perhaps it is also true that Jesus is doing a good bit of waiting, too—that he is the one patient with these disciples, refusing to give up on them even when it seems they've not been listening much at all, and that Jesus is waiting alongside us until we are ready to receive what he has to give. The Spirit will be poured out on these dense disciples soon enough when he speaks these words that many of us heard this past Sunday, and Jesus is willing to be patient with this band so that they will be ready for the gift.

In this day, too, our hope is in the same patient, unresentful Christ, who bears with our questions that sound foolish—and often reflect the fact that we've not been paying much attention at all to Jesus. Our hope is that the same Jesus who refused to scrap his whole mission when the disciples still didn't get it (even after the resurrection and forty days' worth of "convincing proofs") is the same Lord over us. We may be stumbling through the process of discerning just what Jesus is up to among us and in us, and yet the story Luke gives us is of the risen Jesus as one who can bear with our rather slow learning curve. Jesus' vision and work will not be held back by our bumbling in the big picture, and yet Jesus is also able to wait with us, to wait alongside us, to wait for us to let our ears and eyes finally be opened to what he has been saying and showing us all along. No, children, the Kingdom will not look like the rise of a political party to wield power for the truly religious people. No, children, the Kingdom will not look like the protection of one country at the expense of all others. No, children, the Kingdom will not look like me getting a cushy, luxurious life while others are left starving and ignored. No, children, the Kingdom will not even be reducible to higher attendance and offerings at my local congregation. Jesus just plain has bigger fish to fry than any of those. But even though we keep missing the point about what it is Jesus intends to do among us and through us, we get an assurance in this story that the risen Jesus bears with us in all our comically-misguided theorizing and will continue to pour out the Spirit to drench us in the power and presence of the Kingdom of God. Yes, even on a day like today.

Good Lord, you bear with us better than we can bear with ourselves. Give us not only the peace of knowing your patience with us, but also then give us open ears and eyes to recognize the Kingdom you are unleashing, the Kingdom you brought near in Jesus, the Kingdom you bring to the world even through the likes of us as we share your Word, your love, and your ways. We ask it in the name of your patient Way, Jesus.