Inland Empire: Riverside
Pentecost - Audio
[music] Let's pray with me. Father, we thank you for Sunday afternoon, once again, for another day of life in your world of participation and the good things you do. We thank you for the hope that you've made available through Christ, our Lord. Jesus, we thank you that you've given us access to that hope. And even on this side of the new heavens and new earth, we feel encouragement and joy and peace because of that hope. We thank you, Father, for the Scriptures, which continue to offer us guidance, wisdom, and invitation, a calling. And we pray, Father, that you would give us keen minds this afternoon to hear and to hear from you. We thank you for the Church, God, so many stories of victories and gifts. And even the stories of hardship, there is their faith and trust and your power resting on us, God. We thank you for all of the things you're up to, God. Create more and more awareness for us, God, that we might see and be attentive to all you're doing, Father. But we thank you for this next part of our gathering. We pray just to see you more clearly through Christ Jesus, Amen. Okay, so do you know what today is? Yeah, Pentecost, the Red gave it away. You're like, "No, it didn't. I had no idea that's what that meant." Yeah, Pentecost, this is an exciting day for the Church. It's another moment in the year that reminds us that our calendars are not just meaningless, meaningless schedule of appointment after appointment, that our lives have direction. There is a story guiding us. Pentecost is another moment in the year where we were reminded the direction of our lives and the direction of history. I find that to be incredibly comforting because I don't know about you, but I go, I seem to go from appointment to appointment. And it's easy to lose the forest from the trees, is that the saying? Right? So we're going to revisit the story of Pentecost. And Pentecost is our story. It's our story in Christ before whatever other story you tell yourself about yourself, or your parents, or your town, or your work, or whatever stories you have about yourself, this is going to give you an indication every year, but hopefully more than every year, but for the Church. It's really kind of like a birth story for the Church. And we find ourselves, or at least I find myself in a world where the hunger for a story is becoming more and more palpable. I don't know if you sense this. There is a kind of, they call this a like post narrative age, or we are dealing with in the Western world and our part of the world, a crisis of narrative. That is to say, a lot of us don't know what story we are living out. Now the thing is, I think we're lulled into believing we know who we are because we are packed full of information, like through podcasts and social media and YouTube and streaming service. We've never had information so much at our fingertips. But being perfectly informed does not mean that our lives have orientation and direction. The same can be said for the Church. Just having an awesome deep Bible knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that the Church has a direction. Do you know what I mean? And so I think this story gives us an opportunity, one to find our story, but to reconnect with our lives, who we actually are. I know in my life I crave a connection with something bigger than I used to kind of laugh at that people. I like to be a part of something bigger than myself, so that's so lame. But now I kind of get that as I'm getting older. And it comes out in weird ways for me. So most of you know I'm one of the few in our congregation that live in Palm Springs, right? So man, do you go to Palm Springs ever? Do you, okay, it's awesome. I love Palm Springs. Like every day, about six months ago or so around, I think November, I started going on daily walks. I walk about six days a week, Sunday I can't, it's too much going on. I'm cooked by the end of Sunday usually. But I go on these walks. I walk, this will really impress you. I walk about four miles. That's how fit in Agile and active I am as a young man. So I go out and I walk and I own a labradoodle. Do you know what a labradoodle is? Yeah, it's a poodle in a lab mixed with the energy of the devil like in dark fur, dark hair, not fur. And that's by the way, the reason why I own a lab labradoodle. They're not free. You pay a high price for a labradoodle. But I was duped into buying one. Actually, she's my sidekick. So I don't want to say I was duped. But I bought her under the premise that my buddy told me, oh, dude, because I love dogs. And my dog at 14 years had passed away. He's like, dude, you need a labradoodle. They're like a lab, but they have hair instead of fur and they don't shed. Like, sign me up. They don't shed was all I needed to hear. So take my money. And I brought this beast home. And it turns out you have to mix a labradoodle with a labradoodle to get the non shedding type. I have the poodle and labradoodle variety. Scott has a labradoodle, labradoodle mix. So he doesn't get any shedding and I smolder with rage and envy when I visit his home. Our home is mostly black hair. Anyways, sorry. She's my sidekick. She needs to be walked. So every day, it's the best part of my day. I get this space to just go walk and I walk through Palm Springs. And I live in an apartment in a neighborhood that I think is probably really expensive to live in. All the homes are very curated. It feels like 1960 to me when I walk through Palm Springs. Whenever I get a chance to have coffee with Pancho or Darren, I'm always because they work in construction and restoring these homes. I'm so interested in the architecture and how it's like from a bygone era. It feels to me on my walk every day like I'm going through a wormhole or like a warp zone into the past. And I feel like this is what it was like when my grandparents were alive or something like that. That sounds weird, doesn't it? A sort of midlife crisis will do to you. But also I had this amazing experience recently that put me on to the fact that I am kind of on a quest to connect with kind of who I am and where I'm from. I'm from Rockford, Illinois. Anyone? No. Rockford Illinois is not the nicest place on planet Earth. This is a very rough town, actually. Very, very broken, economically, you know, challenged place, just outside of Chicago. But I grew up there and I saw a family there in a couple of weeks, about a month ago. My wife and I went there and we visited my dad and he took us, I asked him, I'm like, can we just drive around Rockford? I want to reconnect with my roots. We drove all around the town and he showed me like the first house my grandparents moved into when they came from the deep south from Alabama and they came to the north to live. And the house my dad grew up in, the house my mom and dad lived in first. Like the schools they went to and the playgrounds, my dad is like the illest guitarist I know. It's like all the different places he played and where cheap trick would come and watch them play because cheap tricks from Rockford, that's a big claim to fame. And I just felt like, wow, this is my story. Like, I felt this connection to this place and it tells me a lot about who I am. It gives me a certain amount of confidence. I think there's something like that experience offered to the church where we get a sense of where we're from and who we are. Let's begin. Acts chapter 1, we'll start in Acts 1, we'll just read a couple verses, Acts chapter 1 verse 6 through 8. So when they, and this is the Jesus' followers, had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And he said to them, it's not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and to end in all Judea and Samaria to the end of the earth. Talk about an agenda, like the whole world is yours. This is around seven weeks, 50 days after Passover, about seven weeks since Jesus has risen from the dead. And just after he says this, they watch him ascend to the Father. But for about seven weeks, Jesus has been appearing to people physically, like we read about at Easter, sitting down to dinner, the resurrected Lord of all. And here the disciples are waiting for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. And Jesus' only answer is just stay put in Jerusalem. Now, Pentecost, that's the holiday that's about seven weeks, it's 49 to 50 days later. That's where Pentec comes from. But it's the festival we read about in the Hebrew Scriptures called Shavuot, which just means weeks. It's called the festival of weeks in our English Bibles. Mostly a harvest festival. Later it gets connected to the giving of the law. But I think here what we're dealing with is this annual festival where people would make like a pilgrimage back to Jerusalem, kind of like, you know, all we have are conferences in the ICOC, maybe something like that, where every year we don't do them every year. But every year, if you're at least, if you're an adult Israelite male, you are to appear three times a year in Jerusalem, not empty-handed for an offering to celebrate God's goodness. It's a way of maintaining who you are and what story you're living in. So this is that time. Again, people are filling Jerusalem just like they did at Passau. I don't know if you remember that from several weeks ago. But they're looking for the kingdom of Israel and Jesus says, "Power will come upon you." That's about all I can say to you. And it will empower y'all to be witnesses of mine, to starting here and then just like radiating out to the rest of the known world, to the ends of the earth. Now when you hear that God is going to dump power on you as a group of his followers, what comes to mind? What does power look like? There's I think very bad kinds of power. And then there's the kind of power we're going to see today. And what does power look like in the church? Do you have a notion? I know the world around us has a notion of what it should look like in the church. And I think it's easy to imagine that when the power of God is on the church, the church is busting at the seams, growing, excited, no one's in sin, everything's coming along. I've yet to see that happen. But it's hard to imagine that power could be found in a very fragile little group of people who are just, they're not growing maybe, but they're abiding in their faithful. Could that be power? What does power look like? What's at the core of what it means to have the power of God in you, on you? This is what our text is about. So let's read some, we'll read a few verses at a time, we're not going to go through the whole chapter. Yeah, okay, Acts chapter two. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as a fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Before we moved here, we were passoring a small little church in Puyallup, which brings me lots of joy to pronounce that correctly. It took about a year and a half and then we moved. Puyallup, Puyallup, Washington, that's the name of the town. And our church was about half Spanish speaking and half English, and I mean like the half that's folk Spanish did not speak English. And people who speak English struggle to understand what I'm saying. So I felt really bad for half of the church that I was the one talking to them every week. We eventually got translation equipment so that everyone could get in on the fire that was coming out of my mouth every Sunday. No, so that we could all participate. This is like that, but without the translation equipment. It's like you imagine this group of disciples waiting and like, Peter, did you just speak Spanish? What language is that? There's this, there's this odd thing happening. And everything that Luke, who's the one who wrote this story, everything that he says comes right out of very specific places throughout the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. It's like Luke is like almost literally we could pull up the Greek New Testament here and word for word, just do a search in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures and we'd see, oh, wow, he's like quoting everything. He's making a point here. Did you catch it? They're sitting there. I don't know, sitting for dinner, waiting, praying, whatever you do while you're sitting at a festival. And the place begins to fill with it. It says the sound. It's very odd. The sound of a mighty wind. I don't know if things were actually blowing off the shelves. The, you know, the, the plates were flying off the table, but it's a sound of a mighty wind filling the whole place. Well, that sounds familiar. Can you think of other instances involving the God of all creation where the, where the weather patterns change? Yeah, almost every time God arrives, there's some kind of meteorological happening in the first time we encounter the Lord God among human beings in the garden story said he's walking among them in like, like a wind, like when God appears to Job, do you remember how God shows up? It's violent, tempest storm? How about Mount Sinai for crying out loud? When God, it says, comes down to meet with the people. The whole place is shaking. The mountain is on fire and the people at the bottom are terrified at God's presence. This isn't a regular thing that happens. When the prophets get these visions of God, think of Isaiah if you're familiar with Isaiah. He has this moment with God in the inner room and he looks, he's in the temple where God is and there are these fiery snakes with six wings screaming, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of armies. The whole earth is the fullness of his glory and it says the place is shaking and it's filled with smoke and all he sees is God's feet or Ezekiel sees these other worldly creatures with the glory of God. My point is when God shows up, it looks like this. This is a story about the Holy Spirit. But what do we learn about what we call the Holy Spirit, the most misunderstood character of the whole Christian Bible for most of us, right? Who is the Holy Spirit? Well, he comes in as if he were God and in fact that's precisely the point. This is God. This is a story about God appearing. Now in the book of Exodus, the children of Israel come through the water and it's the same phrase here by the way. God sends a wind all night long to blow back the water. Do you remember this story? It's the same word for here, for the wind. But then he brings them out and he brings them to the mountain and he gives them instructions. The first thing there to do apparently as a new people freed from Egypt is to build a tent and it's an elaborate description of the tent. And at the end of the book of Exodus, we see Moses, they finished all of the construction for this tent and it's supposed to be a tent where God comes to live with them. And as soon as the thing is active, as soon as the thing is whatever consecrated, kaboom, right? It's like this explosion of God's glory and we're told that the place is filled with cloud and fire, so much soar. The glory of the Lord is so thick in this tent that they've made that Moses has to escape and run out. And the book of Leviticus opens then with us, imagining Moses standing there looking at this tent smoking. God's presence come to live the holy God living among fractured and broken people. And he says to Moses, come here. He summons them and gives them the commands for sacrifices and how to live safely before God. We wouldn't be surprised when Solomon finishes building the temple in Jerusalem, which is just a permanent version of that tent. Same story. They finish the building in kaboom. God comes and fills the place. This is what it's like when God comes home. This is a temple story. Do you see that? God is coming to fill his home. That's what the church is. Before we think about the church as an institution with boards, children's programs, evangelistic strategies, and rock and musicians, whatever. First and foremost, what the church is as we see here, and we'll see this further as we go along, it's the house of God. It's a look like if God's home. The church is this place where God comes to take up residence. Do you remember? I'm throwing a lot of Bible stories at you, so you don't need to know them, but I'll just remind you or you'll learn them here for the first time. Do you remember? There's a story in John chapter 4 where Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at a well. It's a familiar story, women at wells meeting men of God. And he tells her, "There's coming a time when my people, my worshipers, will worship me in spirit and in truth." Not in this building over there or that hill over there, but God will come to fill his worshipers. The community is the place where God comes to take up residence. When we're talking about the Holy Spirit being poured out, we're talking about God come to live among us. And what is the first thing God does is he equips his people to be able to witness to his goodness so that no one is on the outside looking in. This tells us a lot about how God is. If you've ever felt like maybe God doesn't want me to know, or it's too mysterious. We can tend to think of God as like a puzzle or a code we need to decode or something. He wants to make it very clear what he's up to. And so his first act is to equip these people with the ability to speak to those who couldn't, it gives them translation equipment basically, right, built in. Let's read on a few more verses here. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound, the multitude came together and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished saying, I'm not all these who are speaking Galileans. And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language? Here we go. Wonderful list to try to pronounce. Parthings and Medes, alamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontius and Asia, Fergia and Pamphilia, Egypt and parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians. We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. And they were all amazed and perplexed saying to one another, what does this mean? But others' markings said they're filled with new wine. So whatever the commotion was in this room where they were all sitting, it's as if this show has been taken outside. It's drawn attention. It's public. What's going on over there in that room? And they assemble and lo and behold, people who speak different languages are hearing the works of God proclaimed by Galileans. Like Galileans are not your Ivy Leaguers. They're not like the one studying languages. And yet God has given them this ability. Everyone is hearing the works of God. And this list of people is very important. Do you know where else we see this list? It's a story we all know about. It's in Genesis chapter 11. It's a story of the Tower of Babel. Are you familiar with the Tower of Babel story? Well there, we're told in Deuteronomy, Moses says, at the Tower of Babel, God disinherited the nations. If you remember the story, he scatters them and he confuses their language. There's a lot going on in that story. That's one we should come back to. That's a great, helpful story. But Moses says that at the tower of Babel, God assigned all the nations of God. A God would lead each different nation. They would have, they're called sons of God, or like angels would be in charge of each of the nations. But then he says of Israel of Jacob, the Lord says he's mine. And then the very next story is about God calling Abram to be used as a blessing to go out and bless all of those different nations who need to come back to the Lord. That's the list we find here. This is a way of Luke saying this moment is what God has always been driving at. It's why since the fall of the Tower of Babel where the languages were confused, God called a specific people, not just to celebrate them so that everyone else would be on the outside, but so that those people would be a blessing to the rest of the world, the rest of the nations. And here there are Jews living in all of those places which were scattered. And here they're hearing the message about what God has done recently. And they're going to go home and spread to the nations, this message to those who speak their own language. Well Peter goes on and he begins, the first thing he does is he reaches for a passage from the prophet Joel. Lots of Bible today. You can't avoid it with the story of Pentecost. My apologies, but no apologies. And the prophet Joel says that at the end when God finally acts decisively to do what he's always planned to do in creation, at that moment God himself will pour out his spirit on all flesh. Men and women, young and old. God will pour himself out on people in this last act of God in creation. And those people will be saved and anyone who calls on the Lord will be saved. He moves from that to talk about Jesus. And here's his point. That, about God pouring out his spirit, that's this. What you're seeing, that's what's happening right now. You're asking what does this mean? This is the spirit of God. This is what God said he'd always do. This is the decisive moment. We're in a new world now. But he says this has to do with Jesus. He says Jesus. And this is important. He's speaking to the people of God, Jews. Now, maybe these are not the ones who took the nail and drove the spike through Jesus' hands and feet. But he says you crucified the Lord. God was aiming to pour out his spirit. And that's happening. But it's happened because the Messiah you've been waiting for, he showed up and you killed him. That's an encouraging thing to learn. You've killed God. But he says God didn't leave Jesus to rot in the grave. But he's raised him and he's ascended to the Father. Look at verse 2033. This is, to me, this is blow away. Look at verse 33, chapter 2. Let me find it. This chapter, chapter 2, verse 32 starting. This Jesus, God raised up and of that we are all witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the Holy Spirit, he has poured out that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, he will stop there. He says Jesus has risen and ascended to the Father. And God has given Jesus his Holy Spirit. And Jesus has in turn poured out the Holy Spirit. Upon everything you're seeing, this is Jesus. You know, we can tend to think that Jesus just kind of goes away and then the Holy Spirit's a new character that shows up. It's not that simple. In fact, throughout the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Jesus. It says you killed Jesus, the Messiah. And this is Jesus, what you see. Talk about a high view of Jesus. Jesus is ascended to the Father. The Father gives him the Holy Spirit. And it's Jesus who's doing the pouring out. Not only have you killed the Messiah, but he's back, right? And he comes in wind and you can understand him without translation equipment. It's a frightening experience. Look what happens next. We're almost there. Let the whole, this is verse 36. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him, that is Jesus, both Lord, that's the name of God, by the way, and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart. And they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what should we do? And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promises for you and for your children and for all who are far off everyone whom our Lord God calls to himself. And with many other words, he bore witness. And continued to exhort them, saying, save yourself from this crooked generation. So those who received his word were baptized. And there were added that day about 3000 souls were lives, probably better. We'll take this to the streets. Is it going to go away? It did. Wow, look at that. Right. I was like, this is really going to be Pentecost. We're going to go outside. We're going to do the same thing. He's drunk. No, he's not. It's the Spirit. 3000 people accept this message. Imagine hearing that you've done this and Peter's message is, this is really good news for you guys. You can turn back. Now repentance here must not mean, figure out everything you've done wrong and change that. Repentance must mean here, change how you've been thinking about Jesus and call on him because he's God. He can save you, all who call on the name of the Lord, who is Jesus, shall be saved. Call on him. And not only will you be saved, but this power you're seeing, he will give to you. What you're experiencing, he will give to you as you turn to him. Save yourselves. This is good news. Repentance is good news. But Jesus is the God that people might not have seen coming. In fact, later in the book of Acts, there's a man named Stephen who's being killed for challenging the authorities. And as he's dying, we see something remarkable. He says, Jesus received my spirit. Is this amazing? Jesus is not just a prophet who did a magic trick. This is God. This whole thing, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, the Father, they're in cahoots. They're one. Jesus is of the sort that the people pray to him. This is the power of Jesus for his mission. It's not a disconnected thing. This flows right out of the resurrection we celebrated a week ago. I want to bring this home, so buckle up. But let's finish the chapter a few more verses. We'll close with these lines. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And all came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Now do not overlook that last line that it was the Lord. Luke will say something like that very important moments in the church's life. It's actually God who's doing this work. It's not a slick evangelism campaign that's winning people over. The Spirit of God is active in the witness of His people. And now this, what we just read, is the impulse of this fresh new spirit-filled community. We call it the church, but it's not like any church I've been to. Maybe that's a problem. Right? This is a lot different than I would talk about how church and my experience, especially growing up. We get some glimmers of this kind of thing. Their first impulse after being in Jesus is not, you know what we need? We need a stage, an offender stratocaster, and a screen, and some lights, and a PhD on staff, and a board. It's not like let's build a church. That's not their impulse. Let's have a service where it's mostly singing and then someone will lecture us for an hour. It's not like that. Now things develop. I don't want to be too hard on us, but I think the spirit of this early community is very important. And it's the kind of thing I was talking about earlier, this sort of hunger in us and in our world to be associated with a story with one another. When the spirit of God pours out, is poured out onto people, their impulse isn't to just have services. Do you see that? There's a difference. There's this gathering, not just to learn information about God, but this shared being known and sharing with one another. I think this is kind of why when we hold a service in here, you get about half the church, but if you hold a picnic or a pog luck, well then the people we haven't seen for a while show up. Now maybe there's something to that. That's their problem, but maybe there's also something to that that we need to listen to because I think we all crave what we're seeing here, a shared life together where we're seen and known. This is why the expiration date may already have passed on virtual church. You cannot experience the spirit-filled kind of sharing of communal life virtually from a distance. Kind of you could, but you'd have to work really hard to be plugged in. You can view services from a distance and there's part of that that's hard for us to even compete with. I've mentioned this before. I listened to podcasts with scholars from Cambridge and Oxford. I can't give you a sermon like they could. You're going to have to deal with me. If the goal was, I come because the sermons are awesome or the singing is awesome. Go on YouTube. There's better sermons there. There's better worship music there. Hillsong will do a better job than we could. But at the core, that is not what it means to be a spirit-filled community. And so what characterizes our gathering? So I want to get back to that. I think it has something to do with consumerism. But I think this is, for me, a wake-up call and I think an inspiring call to new work, which is, as it turns out, very old work. You got five more minutes and then I'll cut you loose. You okay? We'll go a little long. Okay. You don't want to, and now this is the best stuff. So I want to compare and contrast what we find here with what generally we can tend to find in the church today. Not to be hard on us, but to let this vision, and I think there is something of a vision here. Sit with us. So this is not a crowd. This is a community. This is involvement. Their gatherings. Now again, this is going to change. People are going to go home. It's not always going to be like that. But there's something here to take home. Their gatherings are characterized by four things here, according to Luke. Devotion to the teaching of the apostles. That is the words about Christ, which, as Paul will say later, make it so that we're not tossed back and forth about what the direction is or what the truth is. There's a devotion. There's worship in this, right? There's a commitment to what's next. Fellowship. Now fellowship ain't that break we just had. Sort of. That's a way in, but they don't mean like, hi, how was your week? That's awesome. That was a great fellowship time. Like fellowship is a shared common life. They devoted themselves to the partnership they have in Jesus. It's a shared experience. And when I say share, as they'll say, their homes, their resources, their cars, their clothes, although I couldn't fit in anyone's clothes. But it's a sharing of the whole life. Their gathering is characterized by devotion to the teaching of the apostles, a shared common life, which is hard to get at if all you do is hear someone lecture. So I'm kind of like being hypocritical because I'm actually sitting here lecturing you, but then there's the table. There's this gathering around the table and breaking bread and sharing the Lord's Supper, remembering and rehearsing every time we gather about who we are and knowing one another. And then there's the prayers. How much of the Christian gathering is devoted to prayer? Not enough, probably. That's what we're supposed to be doing is calling on God, I think, when we gather. But that's different. And I think it's something that tells me that whatever our services are, they're not going to do the trick by themselves. Unless we get rid of the service. I don't see that happening anytime soon. And I'm not suggesting we should. But what it means to be a part of the church is not just those things that happen at the American church service. There is a story, not just information. A couple more. Now, there is a hunger for connection, right, in the church service with God. This is where I think, so we are Christians, but consumerism is always at our door, knocking. Did you know that? Do you know why consumer culture is a danger for us as Christians? Do you know why? Because we're Americans. That's who we are. When you got baptized, the reset button didn't go deep enough to erase your consumer mindset. You still have it. And it shows up in subtle ways. It shows up namely in our gathering for worship. And I would love to, and I got to be careful, I can be kind of a grammar police with things. But I think it's important that we don't think of worship merely as what we do when we sing. I think it doesn't help us when we say, "Yeah, I was there for the worship." And we just mean the singing. Our whole lives are called to worship. But when we come to the service, I've led worship for a long time. Like, since I've learned to play the guitar, it's been decades. And I've tried over the years to curate a kind of group of songs that will help people connect to God. How many people do you think connect to God based on all of my hard work? Some. Some don't care. This was beyond us. I'm not the one usually in the back crying at the worship with my hands up. Some are. And it's very easy to come into the gathering. And you could ask me, "How was the worship?" I could say, "Well, yeah, I didn't really connect with God today. I didn't really get there. I didn't have that connection with God that we want." And we can begin to come into the church looking for that connection or that practical sermon that's going to tell us how to be. And we leave disappointed when we don't get it. And man, does that put a lot of pressure on the worship leaders and preachers to be the DJ and play everybody's favorite hit, to get everyone there to connect? But what if it wasn't about that first and foremost? What if the gathering wasn't about us having this connection with God but of us pouring ourselves out? That's a very different mindset. It runs against the grain of everything American in me. But what about me and my walk with God? Try pouring yourself out. You see, the gathering may not always make you leave feeling, "I was so encouraged. It spoke right to me." But every time you meet, you should feel as though you gave yourself to others. This is why I think it's important that the music is not too loud, that we can hear one another as we sing. It's not just a few people on behalf of everybody. But we're all together giving ourselves. I don't like the music we sing on Sunday. If you think I leave here and put that on the radio, you really don't know me. This is not the kind of music I'm listening to. But it's not about that, is it? It's about us coming to give. What a difference. What a way to fight off consumer culture which threatens the church from its witness. If we came with a mindset, how can I pour myself out because of God? I think when you do that and when a community takes that initiative, you get what we see here at the end of Acts too. You get a community who knows each other. And what you get with that, maybe it's not always this seismic activity. By the way, Pentecost didn't happen every Sunday for these early Christians. I think it's easy to imagine. That's what it was like in the early church. People were speaking in different languages and there was explosions and fire and it was crazy every time you turn around. The church was an exciting place to be. I had a mentor early on in my faith who used to say to me and he would reprimand me. It's never a dull moment in the church. It's an adventure. It's always exciting. I'm thinking now as an older man, I'm thinking, what church are you a part of? It's mostly dull moments. Sorry. Not the sugar-coated. It's not always exciting. It's all great to be a Christian. It's awesome. It's explosive. There's always something awesome happening. It's encouraging all the time. Like, boy, you are disconnected from what it means to live the life of faith. Because you know what? You know what the early desert fathers and mothers discovered in their time in the desert? A lot of the life of faith is boredom and it's really hard for us as Americans to deal with life when it's not poppin'. I use the friends. I get poppin' all the time. When it's not like that, we get antsy. What's the direction? Where are we going? We can begin to imagine that the church is a microwave rather than a crock-pot. It doesn't always explode to this kind of growth. It's this regular coming together, giving ourselves, sharing ourselves that over the long haul, which is by the way how God views the church, long haul. He's not interested only in the moment and how exciting it is. He's interested in the formation of a people who over the course of their lives learn to give and teach others to give when it's bored, when the sermon wasn't rockin', when the worship was, eh, it's okay. They still show up. They still give. That's what it looks like when power comes on a community. It's pretty awesome. Well, now I feel like it's fitting to move to the bread and the cup. As one of those things we can do today, that really show who we are. And I wish we're not Catholics, so I don't have the way from break in front of you. And I can't break the little oyster cracker that feels pointless. But there's something to that, and that can get lost in the way we have this meal. But we share this, talk about the fellowship and the common life. We are all sharing the bread and the cup together. We meet each other at the table. We know each other and see each other because of Jesus summoning us to be a part of this community, and not another one. This is where you are. Let's see one more thing on this actually, on that. I was recently counseling a young couple who were at the final stages of deciding to leave their church. And they're talking to me about how do we do this. And the young man said something that really stuck with me. He said, "I don't get anything out of the church anymore. I don't see the point in going." I remember thinking like, "Well, that's sad. And we got to make sure that people get some sense of encouragement and vision of who God is. But I also felt like that's exactly why you shouldn't leave your church. Because we learn how to meet here. This meal shows us that kind of thing. You may come and not get everything out of it. But you encounter God. We share in the fellowship of what Jesus went through. And we do this every time we break the bread and drink the cup. We are reminded of that life that we're not here just for us. And as Americans, I know we got to be careful if we say you don't matter. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not trying to say you personally don't matter. But we need a healthy dose in the other direction. Hopefully the meal today also summons and folds into this whole idea that God has given to us and we now can give to one another. Pretty awesome. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the bread and the cup and this sharing together. It's such a humbling thing to sit together and eat the same bread and drink the same cup and realize all of us needed in escape. All of us needed freeing from our bondage. All of us crawled out of darkness to find you. And you greeted us and washed us off and gave us to one another. And there's such humanity in this meal, us seeing your love and knowing we're a part of a family. Father, I pray that you help us more and more to be in touch with that story of who we are. Thank you for this time through Christ the Lord. Amen.
Inland Empire Church of Christ