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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
The rest of you look fantastic. You look good. Has anybody in here had a chance to drive in one of those driverless Waymo cars yet? Not me? Just me? Four of us? All right. Really? Those are all over the place. They're taking over Austin. Well, if you've never been in one, they're super fun. Don't let me scare you off with this one. But there is kind of a moment when you're in this driverless car, and no one's in the driver's seat, and you're looking at the wheel turn and the signals and all this stuff, and you kind of have this existential crisis a little bit. Are we going to live? How does this work? Holy cow. Everybody's looking at the car. When I was in there with my kids, they were like, This is crazy. But yeah, there's this moment where you're looking at the car drive itself. It's not really driving itself. It kind of is, but you can't see the one driving the car. It can be a bit uncomfortable, maybe terrifying for some people. I thought it was pretty fun. You should try it if you haven't. And I think as we sit in these driverless cars and really process into a world that is more and more sort of automated for us, it's a little uncomfortable. It's a little bit like, are we not in control of anything? We, I, am the kind of person that likes to manage outcomes. Right? I like to direct things a little bit. My therapist tells me that I've got to work on when I'm not in control of things. That's where my work is. I'll tell you guys that. I wonder if you can relate to this. I want to control things. I want to direct things. I want to manage things because I want to protect what I love. I want to protect what's important to me, what's valuable to me. I want to keep it safe and keep things moving in the direction I think things should go. Everybody in that crowd, that Pentecost crowd, had the same question. I think they're probably all sort of feeling like that Waymo moment a little bit. Not so much what's happening here. They knew something was going on. The question was, how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language, the deeds of God, Parthians, Medes, Egyptians, Arabs, visitors from Rome, all of them standing around in Jerusalem, all of them hearing these Galileans speak in the language of their heart. And by that we mean the language that you dream in, right? The language that you think in. The language that your Abuelita spoke to you. That language of your heart. How is it that we can hear the deeds of God's power in my own heart language? And underneath the amazement was something else. I think something kind of uncomfortable. Because if the spirit can show up here, like this, doing these sorts of things for all sorts of people, then who's driving this? Who's in control of the spirit? That's where it gets a bit uncomfortable. Some people in the crowd, I think, didn't like that this was an uncontrollable sort of unmanageable spirit, something that was going on. And so they sneered. They said, well, these folks must be hammered, right? And I think that's a funny line, but I think it's also what people say when they're like, this can't be what we think it is. This has to be something. This needs to be under control. There needs to be a reason, an explanation that we can wrap our hands around this thing and steer this in the right direction. The control move, I think, actually. Explain it away. Dismiss it. Protect the process. This isn't the first time someone tried to manage the spirit. Maybe you've tried to do this in your own life. I certainly have. We read in Numbers a sort of a control of the spirit sort of moment, right? Moses had the answer 1400 years before Pentecost even arrived in the early church when Eldad and Midad prophesied in the camp outside the tent, outside the process, outside the approved channels of power and leadership and authority. Joshua said, Moses, stop what they're doing. Stop them. And Moses said, are you jealous for my sake? Now listen to this. Would that all the world's people were prophets. Would that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them. How beautiful, how amazing. See, Moses, he wasn't interested in domesticating God. Moses wasn't interested in stopping what the spirit was doing. He's interested in the spirit doing whatever the spirit does and that the spirit would be placed upon all of God's people, that all of us would prophesy. Whoa, wouldn't that be amazing? You can kind of hear the groaning of Moses' heart. The psalmist knew this as well. He prayed the psalm together. The earth is full of God's creatures, the great white sea, living things too many to number and what sustains all of God's creatures. You send forth your spirit and they are created. You renew the face of the earth. The spirit is not a rare power rationed only to the religiously qualified. Can I say that again? The spirit is not some obscure rare power that the church gets to bottle up and then distribute to the only those who are spiritually qualified. That is not what the spirit is. The spirit, friends, is God's own self, the third person of the Holy Trinity. There's a reason we stay bowed for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Don't come up on spirit. Give some reverence to the third person. That's why we do that, right? Let us finish the sentence. The spirit is God's own self, the breath underneath everything that is and everything that lives, the force that keeps creation from collapsing back into dust. The Pentecost is not something new breaking in that early Christians discovered, right? Got to handle it. No. The spirit is something that's always been as God is eternal, uncreated. The spirit's always been true and breaking open this world to the will of God. It's beautiful if you take it in and really imagine it. It's sort of beyond like church rhetoric. Imagine the spirit finally breaking open your life, this world, and what God wants done is accomplished. That's what the spirit does. Now back in Jerusalem, Peter stands up and he quotes Joel. I love this moment. I will put out my spirit upon all flesh, sons and daughters, young men and old men, slaves, both men and women, every boundary the ancient world knew of, every boundary that our world uses to decide who gets access to God, who's in, who's out, right? Who qualifies, gender, age, social status, wealth? The spirit undermines and crosses all of those boundaries, praise God. And if the spirit didn't, I wouldn't be here. And the spirit goes across these boundaries and undermines those divisions we set up for ourselves, not eventually, but has already done those things. We live in an Easter world in which death itself has been transgressed. We live in a world in which God is placing God's spirit on us, even me? Yes. That day has already come. The spirit has already included us, all of us. And Jesus in John's Gospel, I love this. I think if I was around Jesus in his earthly ministry and he would blurt out things like this in public, I would be uncomfortable in the moment, but then I would act like later on, later in the years I'd be like, yeah, I was cool with that. That's how we rolled. That's how we did things. Jesus in the Gospel, he cries out in the middle of this party. Imagine this huge festival and publicly in the crowd he says, let anyone who is thirsty come to me. Anyone. Anyone. Anyone. Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water. Not a trickle, not a drippy faucet, right? Rivers overflowing with abundance, breaking over the banks, reaching places that wasn't planned to flow and flowing all over the place, nourishing the ground that no one thought to irrigate because nothing could live there. The Spirit's river, that water flows through our lives and into this world. And in that announcement, that public announcement that happened 2,000 years ago, Jesus still calls to the church and calls to us. The Spirit still moves towards us and we need this day every year. Really, we should have it like more than that, to be honest. To remind us that the Spirit moves towards us. The Spirit fills us and empowers us. It's not that God ignores that we draw lines and boundaries around God and who gets access to God. It's not like God's oblivious to that. God knows how that works, how we do that, right? So much as it seems God is eager to find anyone, no matter and despite the boundaries and divisions that we have arranged in our world. Honestly, I think God gets a kick out of crossing those boundaries. We put people in a box. We put ourselves in a box. And whatever box that we find ourselves or we put other people in, God seems to find a way again and again to go get those people, to come get us and to cross whatever boundary we think would keep us from God. And only, friend, this is such good news to me, and only the Spirit gets to decide how and when and who. Not me, not you, not people in power. The Spirit. The Spirit decides how the Spirit moves. And praise God for that. And friends, can I even say more specifically, you don't even get to decide if the Spirit moves toward you? God loves you. The Spirit is so eager, and I promise you already, long at work in your life and in your heart, the Spirit is eager to be near you. So many times in my own life, I feel that pull of the Spirit, that movement of the Spirit towards me in my life. And in places that, if I'm honest, it's kind of embarrassing, I just think, well, you know, probably not here. I won't hear the Spirit. I'm not on my toes looking for the Spirit in some of these places. And again and again, I find my life changing exactly when I don't expect the Spirit to change my life or not to surprise me, right? But again, the Spirit is wild, not domesticated. I don't have it on lock. I don't know how this thing works. Oftentimes, because of this, my life is changing in ways that are in my blind spots that needed to change, that I really needed to not be managing and in control of. Years ago, this is one really beautiful example of this happening in my life. Years ago, I would host this like secret brunch with all my LGBTQ friends in the church. And at the time, it was secret because the domination we were part of was like anxious about that stuff. And in fact, drawing boundaries and lines that we left open. So that's another story. But we have a secret brunch, right? And it's an awesome job and it was awesome. I pay for the mimosas. And I just wanted to hear the story. We'd hear the stories. And I kept hearing in those conversations the same feeling that I have. I just want to be understood, right? Not fixed, not managed, not boxed, not translated into something more acceptable. Understood, known, loved in the language that comes native to me. The language I already have. Can you understand me there? Friends, I think that hunger that I heard at those tables is not just for me and just for them. I think we all share in the hunger, do we not? We just want to be known and to be understood. And it turns out the good news is the spirit has always known how to speak our language and how to understand our language. How to find us and how to be found by us. How to understand us and how we can understand who God is. The spirit's really good at this. But the problem is I think what makes this really difficult is in this world everyone is talking and almost no one is listening. We're not lacking for more words, right? More information. More noise. What we're lacking is understanding. Comprehension. The experience of being genuinely understood in the language that you already have. Right? The miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone started speaking the same language. The point of Pentecost wasn't uniformity. The miracle of Pentecost is that every person heard the gospel in their own language. Their own idiom. Their own tongue. The language they dream in and pray in. The language they reach for when they are frightened or in love. That language, the spirit speaks. And God reached everyone without requiring anyone to become something else first. You notice that? This is what the controller in us resists. The type of person who's like who's going to be driving this car, right? I've got to get a hold of this. We've got to bottle this up. This is dangerous. Because if the spirit really does flow like rivers into any thirsty ground it finds then we are not the gatekeepers we thought we were. And turns out God doesn't need our protection as much as we thought. The tent is not the only place where we will run into God or hear the church prophesy. The approved channels are not the only channels. The people we expect to prophesy are not the only ones who will prophesy. Our job is not to control it or to figure it out or sort it. Our job is to stay thirsty. To desire it. To desire the spirit. To listen for the voice of God. To be sensitive to the movement of God's spirit towards us. And to build a community so open to the spirit's movement that when it shows up in someone we didn't expect speaking a language we didn't plan for we sound less like Joshua and more like Moses. But that all the Lord's people were prophets. And so we say to that this morning. Amen and come Holy Spirit. Yeah?