James 24:7

For several weeks now I have had a phrase repeating itself in my mind: "The enormity of the call and the inadequacy of the called."   That thought entered my mind as I prepared a sermon on Acts 1:14.   That text speaks to the response of the 120 disciples in Jerusalem as they waited for the promise of the Holy Spirit to be fulfilled.  

Jesus had taught this group- some had denied him, some of them had fled at the moment of His arrest, some had hidden out- concerning the coming of the Kingdom.  He had called them to mission and ministry and told them that they would be His witnesses in familiar and unfamiliar places both near and far away.  He had told them to wait on the Spirit of God who would clothe them in power.

And there they gathered...an inadequate people facing an enormous calling.

They did not flee this time.  They did not scatter.  They did not deny what he had said.

They prayed, all of them, together with the women.

The phrase rolled through my mind again last night as I listened to the news about what had happened at Virginia Tech.  Having spent a number of years ministering and teaching on college campuses, I could just imagine the trauma that the students, staff and faculty must have endured (and will endure for some time...for some even a lifetime.)

I wondered yet again about the state of our world.  And I wondered about the state of the church.

I asked myself: "What ought we be doing differently as the church that could help stem the tide of violence in our society?"

The answer I heard in my own heart and mind was that we need to do a better job of equipping one another for ministry out in the day to day world.

I wondered how the world might change if all Christians were better equipped to listen to people who are lost and in pain.  I imagined an army of people wearing t-shirts or buttons that said: "If you need to talk, I will listen."

I thought about those Kleenex commercials with the guy who sits in a chair and listens to a person sitting on a couch in the middle of a downtown sidewalk.  I thought about how that might be one way of going about being the church...be willing and able to pull up a chair and just listen to someone lost and in pain.

Not long ago I was talking to a couple of guys who are on the staff of a large church.  I asked them about a particular ministry in their church and they replied: "All they do is listen to people; they never get around to ministry."

Hmmm.....

Yesterday I was reading a book on prayer. (I am reading several right now)  The author reminded me that prayer is a 2-way street.  God initiates prayer.  We pray.  God listens.  God speaks.  We listen.

Prayer is listening.

I'm rambling....

It just seems to me that the world might be a different place if all of Jesus' disciples made listening one of their central ministries.

And maybe...just maybe...the best place to start such a ministry is in prayer where we speak to God but also listen to God... especially as we contemplate the "enormity of the call and the inadequacy of the called."

I have been emphasizing the importance of congregational prayer in my sermons lately.  My concern about that narrow topic grew out of the reading and thinking I have been doing with regard to the missional church.  My thinking about that topic has taken me back to the first 4 chapters of the Book of Acts. 

As I  learn more about the missional church and contemplate the earliest days of the church, one phrase rings in my mind: "the enormity of the calling and inadequacy of the called."

Think about it: Jesus meets with his disciples one last time before he ascends to God and tells them that they will be his witnesses starting right where they are, into the surrounding region, over into an area they avoided to a people they despised, and even to the uttermost parts of the world.

That's an enormous calling.

He called people who, in themselves, were not up to it.  He called the very people who had abandoned him and denied him.

That's the "inadequate called."

What did they do?  They didn't seize control and try to manage their way forward and they didn't flee (again). 

They prayed constantly together.

Yesterday we thought about that body of believers as they prayed following the arrest of Peter and John.  Luke records the actual prayer they prayed.  (you can read the whole account here)

In the sermon, I noted 4 parts of the prayer:

1.  They acknowledged who God is (Sovereign, Creator).

2.  They acknowledged what God said through David the Psalmist.  (That the nations and their rulers would be against them)

3.  They acknowledged what God did. (He had a plan that even those who crucified Christ followed.)

4.  They acknowledged what God can do. (He can give them even more boldness to continue proclaiming the gospel and can do signs and wonders to demonstrate his power)

The take away is that in the face of a crisis, they did not shrink back in fear but  recalled the nature of God, the truth of God's word,  God's involvement in the past, and they prayed for greater boldness, for more courage to go on.

When we acknowledge that everything is God's and that God is engaged with us just as God has been in the past, we can pray our way forward undeterred by any obstacle.  We can go on trusting that as the gospel song puts it: "If He did it before, He can do it again!"

We are not unlike those first Christians who stood with their mouths open as Jesus ascended to the Father.  Having heard that their first calling was to the ministry of waiting, their minds raced at the prospects of being clothed with "power from on high" and becoming witnesses to the uttermost parts of the world of the crucified and resurrected Jesus.

None of them had been very far from home and now they were being called to the mission field white unto harvest.

I know I am filling in the silences of scripture, but I imagine they felt what we all feel when we think deeply about the enormity of the calling and the inadequacy of the called.

"Lord, you want us to do that?"

I put myself in their sandals, as best I can, and ask myself: "What would you do?" 

I hear myself wondering how fast I can run with a bad heart and loose shoes. 

Then, I see myself appointing a committee or two, drawing up a vision statement, developing a strategic plan and executing the strategy.

I look back to the text and see them "...constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women..." (Acts 1:14)

What else? 

Having decided not to run and having chosen not to organize themselves for strategic action what else could they do given the enormity of the calling and the inadequacy of the called?

They, the men, the apostles, the very inner circle of Jesus  "constantly devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women..."

Those who were formerly walled out of the Temple and hidden behind the veil of the synagogue joined those nervous men and all of them together stood on level ground looking toward the anxious horizon of their calling and devoted themselves constantly to prayer.

What else?

Gone were their practices of exclusion; gone was their all-shoulders confidence; gone was the luxury of the prayer of convenience...

Given the enormity of their calling and the inadequacy of the called, "they devoted themselves constantly to prayer, together with the women." 

Recently I read and reviewed Bishop N.T. Wright's latest book called Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.  In the first four chapters of that book, Bishop Wright describes four common, if not universal, concerns: (1) the struggle for justice, (2) the search for meaning, (3) the yearning for deep relationship, and (4) the longing for beauty. While one would be hard-pressed to prove that those were all universal concerns, I think most folks would agree that it at least makes sense that everyone hungers for those four things. 

We all seem to have questions as to rightness and fairness, whether there is something larger than ourselves, something ultimately truthful that can claim us, whether true deep relatedness and community is possible, and whether and how we can experience beauty. 

In his book, Bishop Wright seeks to demonstrate how Christian faith answers to those yearnings.

As I drove home yesterday after worship I thought about Bishop Wright's 4 yearnings and how the very sermon I had just preached spoke to them.  I began the sermon by reading the words of Paul where he says that when we are baptized we are buried with Christ and that we rise from the death and burial of baptism  "just as Jesus was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father"  to walk in newness of life.

We rise to walk in a life marked by ressurection.

I then read a quote from Dallas Willard's new book, The Great Omission, in which he speaks of the Great Disparity- the gap between what we claim as Christians and what others observe about us: we claim to walk in this newness of life but, by most measures, live like most everybody else.  

Where is this ressurection life, this abundant life, this new creation about which the Bible speaks and  which we claim to live?

I thought it would be worthwhile to look at an example of what the ressurected life looked like and so we turned to the picture of the church drawn by Luke in Acts 2-4.  There we found a community marked by 3 characteristics: they attended to the essentials, they demonstrated gracious sharing and and they lived truthfully.

The disciples of Jesus attended to the essentials.  They gave themselves to the fellowship, the Apostles Doctrine, the breaking of bread and to prayer.

They shared with one another even if it entailed selling one's own property to do so.    The outcome of such sharing was that there was no needy person among them.

They lived truthfully with one another such that the fundamental characteristic of any community (or relationship), trust, was abundant. (The negative case of Annanias and Sapphira in Acts 5 demonstrate that hypocrisy and dishonesty are death to a community.*)

I tried to make the point that the ressurected life into which we are born is not a life marked by goose-bump inducing spiritual or emotional experiences but a life of graciousness and truthfulness.

As I drove home I thought about that early community and about what a wonderful and remarkable thing was born into the world when the church was born on Pentecost. 

The commitment to the essentials devoid of the institutional, doctrinal and theological wrangling that has become so much a part of the contemporary church, the grace-filled sharing of goods and resources and self, and the freedom from status seeking and acquisitiveness that enabled truthfulness to flourish made the first church, in its earliest days, an image of God's longing for humanity.

For a brief moment and only by the power and grace of God, the church got back to the Garden.

As I thought about that I thought about N.T. Wright's 4 hungers: the hunger for justice, meaning and purpose, relationship and beauty and realized that the earliest moment of the church fed those four hungers.

Justice was realized...there was no needy among them.

Meaning and purpose was received...each disciple and all of them together were caught up in God's new thing.

Relationship, broken by the power of sin, was restored...each shared with the other even if it entailed expense to himself or herself.

And beauty...well, just look at them reveling in the joy of community, basking in the sun of fidelity , attuned to the essentials of life in Christ.

---------- 

(* I am indebted to my friend Wye Huxford of the European Evangelistic Society for this insight...among others!  Also, I have been reading N.T. Wright's book Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship and Luke Timothy Johnson's Living Jesus:Learning the Heart of the Gospel.  Those books have been of immeasurable help in expanding my understanding of "ressurection".  I don't have any original thoughts, which is a very good thing and a confession I happily make.

------

I have been AWOL from my blog because we have been moving the North River Community Church to a new location.  For those of you in the Atlanta area, we are now located at 1725 Spectrum Drive, Suite B in Lawrenceville, Ga.  Here are some directions if you are ever in the area...click rat cheer.

Here's something to discuss with your friends....

You are a eunuch, an Ethiopian, the Greenspan of Ethiopia, a numbers guy who keeps the books for Candace, the queen of Ethiopia. 

You are a convert to Judaism.  You have been to Jerusalem to worship.  You were not able to get too close to the Temple.  You are a eunuch and cannot be a part of the assembly.

You are parked in a rest stop on miles and miles of miles and miles of desert road over in Gaza.   

Your horse, hot from pulling your chariot, faces toward home.  Your driver has slipped off into the bushes to relieve himself.

You are struck by the quiet.  You look up the road and down the road and see no one.

You reach into your things and retrieve the scroll you picked up in Jerusalem.  You scan it. 

You pick a text and read:

"Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.  Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth."

Suddenly you hear the thump of footsteps rapidly approaching.  You look up from the text and see a man running toward you.  He stops beside your chariot and breathlessly asks:

"Do you understand what you are reading?"

What would you think?  How would you explain this event, this stopping on a desert road, the choice of this text, this breathless Jew-from-out-of-nowhere asking you if you understand the words you read?

(Acts 8:26-33)

Also...check out my latest book review (click over in the left column)...Marilyn Johnson's book called The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries is an epiphany of an epiphany of an epiphany of an epiphany.