Posts
You may have heard of poetry slams or story slams. These are live events where folks share a poem or a great story. I tell stories for a living. I’m into story slams.
Several years ago, the Moth hosted story slam and Auburn Sandstrom got up to share a story. She talked about that night when she hit bottom. She had grown up with a comfortable life: undergrad was paid for, she had music lessons, now had a masters degree. But through a series of events, she had become addicted; and that night, she lay on the floor, flooded with anxiety, folding and unfolding a small piece of paper with a telephone number on it that her mother had given her. “This is the number for a Christian counselor,” her mother had told her.
Auburn hadn’t been hanging with any particular religion at that point, but she was desperate, and she punched in the numbers. When the man answered, she said, “Hi, I got this number from my mother do you think you could maybe talk to me?” She heard him shuffling to sit up in bed and he replied, “yes, yes, yes. What going on?” Amber began to pour her heart out to him: the truth about her troubled marriage, her addiction, her fears with her son. She told him everything. For hours, he sat and patiently listened—and remarked, “tell me more…oh, that must hurt, oh.”
Auburn made the call at 2 in the morning and he stayed up on the phone listening to her all night until the sun rose and her panic began to subside. She said she didn’t care what his religion was, but as she began to get a hold of herself, she told him how much she appreciated him. Her mother had mentioned that he was a Christian counselor. Did he want her to go read some bible verses or something?
“Auburn,” he said, “please don’t hang up, I’ve been trying not to bring this up.”
“What?” she asked him.
“The number you called?” He said. “…wrong number.”
She didn’t hang up on him.
But, she said, the next day, she experienced what she has heard called “the peace that passes all understanding.” It was this sense, as she put it, that there was random love in the universe, some of it was unconditional and some of it was for her.
Thinking of this man and the role he played in Auburn’s life remind me that we never know exactly how the Holy Spirit will draw us into Jesus’ mission of love.
In our story from Acts today we hear of the Holy Spirit drawing Saul into the work of the church. Saul--also known as Paul depending on if he’s in a Greek-speaking city like Tarsus or an Aramaic speaking community in Jerusalem--had been terrible to early Christians: Vile and violent and it all comes to a head, when he stones Steven to death. It’s terrible. And then, on that Road to Damascus, the Holy Spirit knocks him off his feet and he falls to the ground.
“Saul, Saul, what are you doing! Why are you persecuting people!” The voice of Jesus calls out.
Saul loses his bearings there on the road and they have to carry him to someone’s house in town. It’s not until the church leader, Ananias, comes to Saul and reluctantly lays his hands on him that his sight is restored, his perspective is shifted, and he is transformed. Saul becomes not only an apostle of the Lord but a person who wrote all of these important parts of our New Testament and had a very central role in shaping what has today become Christianity. It was unexpected! for Saul and for the people of the early church.
Most of us don’t get a random midnight call from a person in dire need of support. Most of us don’t hit the ground in awe at the sound of Jesus’ voice crying out to us. Many of us do, however, underestimate our own potential as people who have a part to play in the mission of Jesus.
You know how, when I give announcements at the end of the service, you sometimes think that they’re for anyone else but you? If I announce that I need 5 of you to bring a cherry pie to church next week, the majority of you are probably going to tell yourself, “well, that’s not for me…someone else will do that.”
Some of you have heard me say this before but when I worked in Latin America, a Honduran pastor once mentioned to me: “Lindsay, the difference is that in your country, religion is a plaything that people can take or leave. Here, in Latin America it is the heart of what we have.” In one sense, I see where he is coming from. We have so much control over our lives, we have so much comfort so much agency that it doesn’t always seem to matter if we participate. On occasion, when we lose that sense of control, it bring us to our knees, but often, we’re left asking: does it matter if I show up? Does it matter how I live my life? How I spend my money? How I treat people?
While I appreciate the truth of the fact that Jesus has no hands but ours, and no feet but ours, in the stories about the early church, like this one with Saul from the book of Acts, it is Jesus, himself, who is working along side of the people. Jesus is doing his own recruiting here in this story. And Jesus is doing his own recruiting now, here today. For what it’s worth, it is really a mighty strange choice for Jesus to recruit Saul—don’t ask me why does Jesus choose this guy, of all people, to pull into a leadership role.
All I can say is that involving the least likely candidates to build this kingdom of God is one of God’s signature moves. It’s a through line in our bible: we see it in the stories like the one of Jacob and Esau, or in God choosing to be born into a really unlikely family in Bethlehem, or even in the use of the Roman cross of crucifixion—a most unlikely instrument--which God somehow turns into a tree of life.
Look at today’s story from the gospel: In this one, Jesus is putting a shepherd’s staff into the hands of Peter who is flustered and ashamed and telling him to take care of the sheep. This is the same Peter who denied Jesus three times near the foot of the cross and is doubting if he is qualified or capable of doing anything in this movement let alone lead the church.
It takes courage to work through that. Courage to participate in what Jesus is calling us to do. It takes courage to participate when you doubt if all of this actually matters, when you feel like you’re not good enough, or when we’re faced with our own shortcomings like Peter, who really doubted if he was qualified. It takes strength of soul to participate in this movement when you feel like your workspace is toxic and all consuming, or when you’re burdened down with a clenching grief. It takes courage to participate when you’re eclipsed by the possibility of failure—and here, I will say that 15 months ago, I was terrified that I would fail at my role as a parent or a pastor. Do you know how long it took me to upload sermons to youtube? …Hours! Do you know how bored I was personally attending preschool on line? to tears! And yet, it took courage to press on and do it.
We’ve been practicing a certain kind of courage for 2 years at home. Two years ago, we didn’t know what this would all bring. There was a point in early of May of 2020 when it took courage to go into a pharmacy and buy Tylenol for my kid. I needed courage to continue loving my husband who I adore but kind of wanted to kill when we were all locked in together. I needed courage to reinvent my job. And you? You needed courage to do the same. And courage when your loved ones were not okay. And courage to keep going when you worried that the world would never get back to normal.
Even in this last year, it has taken courage to claim the kind of life we desire for our families: to send our kids to school, to come back to church, to apply for new jobs, to reach out when we we’re lonely. We have drawn on courage like never before these last 2 years. We know what courage is.
And…we are a little out of practice employing it with people outside of our household or outside of our immediate circles. We are out of practice with engaging with a Spirit that can and will knock us to the ground. When Jesus says to Peter, “tend my sheep,” Peter could have drifted back to his old, safe life in Galilee. He could have retreated and returned to what he knew. It was a risk when Jesus looked him in the eye and held out that shepherd staff: “feed my sheep.” But there was power there on the beach in the promise of new life in the risen Jesus. Dear ones, there is power today in the promise of new life in the risen Jesus today.
We come here to church and we are fueled for the courageous life that Jesus calls us to. Here in this space of worship we practice how to live in the world. We confess our sin and work at forgiving each other. We share the peace with each other. We eat at the table together with people who might think differently from us. And then we go from this space and we put it into practice. That practice and way we live our lives as people of th Way strengthens the fabric of this Kingdom of God around us. It makes our world stronger, it strengthens the chords of love, justice, mercy and joy that run as deep undertones to who we are. It changes us ever so subtly and slowly into who God calls us to be.
Who, dear ones, is God calling you to towards? Where is God calling you to take a step forward?
When Auburn Sandstrom finished her story slam, she said that in the deepest night of despair and anxiety, it only took a pinhole of light for grace to flood in.
We, dear ones, have a part to play in the mission of Jesus. You may feel unqualified or apathetic, you may wonder if it all actually matters. Sometimes, it calls for us to do things we have never imagined, and sometimes, it calls for us to make a simple pinhole of light for all of grace to come rushing in and the kingdom of God to flood the space around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment