Riding A Wave

Riding a Wave--June 6, 2017

"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 last week.

Maybe you caught the story amidst all the other headlines and turmoil: for just the third time EVER (like ever in human history) scientists observed gravitational waves, which are ripples in the very fabric of space-time itself.  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.

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.