Dear Faith Family,
"Wait and Pray." Spend much time around "church" or reading spiritual writings, and you're likely to hear (rather often) these three words: Wait and Pray. I am sure you've had them spoken to you...or maybe even spoken them to others?
Whether given as counsel to the conflicted and confused or offered as an admonishment to the impetuous, this ubiquitous instruction has, as we learned on Sunday, its origin in our beginning, at "the birth of the church."
And while eating with them,
Jesus ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem,
but to wait for the promise of the Father...
All these with one accord were
devoting themselves to prayer, together...
(Acts 1:4, 14)
Unfortunately for some, like myself, we receive this foundational exhortation as if it is a recipe: Mix a little waiting with a dash of prayer, preferably in isolation from others. Let it bake for a bit, and then, voila, your desire dish is before you!
While patient and persistent faith pays off (as Psalm 37:5-7 and Luke 18:1-8 testify), the repeated pattern of the Church is not so much about getting what we desire—even if we desire good—but being prepared to participate in something beyond what we could desire or even imagine.
That's what we see happening as the end of waiting and praying, "When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place...And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." (Acts 2:1,4). But what we notice in the rest of this story, as Willie James Jennings points out, and the repeated pattern throughout Acts, is that what is produced from waiting and praying is not necessarily what is desired; it's beyond it:
"The Miracle of Pentecost is less in the hearing and much more in the speaking. Disciples speak in the mother tongues of others, not by their design but by the Spirit's desire...This is a joining, unprecedented, unanticipated, unwanted [as the following stories show], yet complete joining. Those gathered in prayer asked for power [what they imagined God could do]. They may have asked for the Holy Spirit to come [what they desired God to give], but they did not ask for this. [For God to take hold of their tongues, their voices, their minds, hearts, and bodies; to draw them into His desire and actions for others.] This is grace, untamed grace. It is the grace that replaces our fantasies of power over people [or circumstances] with God's fantasy for, desire for people."
The stories of the Book of Acts reveal that active waiting and persistent praying with others is a pattern that prepares us to be drawn into God's desires and participate in God's actions for others: those we know and love, for those we barely see, and for those we'd rather not. Preparation, as we'll see, which invites us into more than we can ask or imagine if we are open to His love. God's love, says Jennings, "is love that cannot be tamed, or controlled, or planned, and [now] unleashed...[drives]...disciples forward into the world and [drives] a question into their lives: Where is the Holy Spirit taking us and into whose lives?"
So, I encourage you this week to start reading the acts of Jesus and the Holy Spirit with us, allowing the stories and patterns to open us to “untamed grace.” You can find the reading plan here.
May we, as Dylan pointed out on Sunday, discover and experience in our active waiting and devoted prayer with one another, our life together looking more and more like Jesus' life. Which, after all, is the end of the church as we know it.
Love you, faith family! God bless.