Out Of Thin Air

"Out of Thin Air"
Ezekiel 37:1-14

Isn’t it fascinating that the most important things in life are invisible?  Love, for instance.  You can’t bottle it.  You can’t mass produce it. You can’t, as the saying goes, buy it.  It’s just there.  We know it’s there -- an invisible chord that ties one heart to another.

Or, how about a word?  In one of its most powerful forms, it is invisible.  Certainly you can see a word on a printed page.  You can put a few of them together into a sentence, a paragraph, a poem, a book.  So, words can be visible on a page, but the feelings they invoke are invisible.

What happens, though, when those words are spoken?  Like in a halftime talk with a basketball team.  Like during a quiet and romantic dinner conversation between a man and a woman.  Like in a sermon by a preacher.  The words, once spoken, are invisible.  Only mere ripples in the invisible air.  Yet, in each of those scenes that I mentioned, imagine how much power those invisible words can have to evoke inspiration, love, faith.

Invisible.  Yet powerful.  Like imperceptible sparks that can ignite our emotional kindling setting our spirit on fire.  So, in this way, invisibility is only a mysterious cloak for a powerful reality.  It is those certain realities that I would have you ponder with me for a few minutes this morning.

Think again, for a moment, of the power of the invisible, spoken word.  Let’s think about that word in the context of this story of the valley of dry bones that I read from Ezekiel.

First, get a feeling for how utterly hopeless this scene is.  Try to imagine the impact it has on Ezekiel as he gazes at it.  The ground is covered with bones.  Not whole skeletons intact, but disjointed piles of bones.  Human bones.  Skulls.  Femurs.  Fibulas, tibias and ribs.  Vertebrae and hip sockets.  There are a total of 206 bones in the human body.  Across this valley are thousands of people, 206 bones each.  All strewn randomly across that vast valley floor.

“...and they were very dry.”  They had been there a long time.  Picked clean by hyenas, vultures, and beetles.  All those bones were beginning to splinter and peel from their dryness.  Under the light and heat and radiation of the sun everything was bleached and returning to dust.

The Voice of God speaks:  “Can these bones live?”  Ezekiel evades answering the question directly, but his answer betrays his futility.  His inner voice is shouting, “NO WAY!”  But what he says is, “Master God, only you know that.”

Then comes the part that needs our careful concentration.  God asks Ezekiel to do what?  To speak!  To say words over all those dry bones.  “Speak over these bones:  ‘Dry bones, listen to the Message of God!’”  What!?  Just think of the utter ridiculousness of that instruction.  Talk to dry, disjointed bones.  Talk to them as if they can hear.  Tell them to listen, as if dry bones have ears, which they don’t.  Talk to them as if they will respond to mere, invisible words, as if they have the ability to respond to what they are told.

Yet Ezekiel spoke, as he was instructed by God.  Notice how Ezekiel tells this story.  “As I spoke, there was a sound and, oh, rustling!  The bones moved and came together, bone to bone.”  Ezekiel hadn’t even finished his speech, given to him by God, before things began to happen.  How many words had he uttered?  One?  Three?  Ten?  Does it matter?

What’s the point?  The point is the power of an invisible word, spoken over dry bones, that makes them not only reform into full skeletons, but also fills those skeletons with internal organs, and covers them over with tendons and sinews and muscles and veins and skin.  Merely a spoken word.  But not just any word -- God’s word, spoken through the prophet Ezekiel.  A word!  An invisible, potent God word!

Think how Ezekiel’s thoughts begin to churn as he remembers other faith stories.  Like the story of creation.  That is another picture of utter and hopeless desolation.  Formlessness.  Raging powers.  Total, thick darkness.  Nothingness.  Absolute chaos.

But what does God do?  God speaks.  And when a word comes out of God’s mouth, there was light, there was sky, land, sun, moon, and stars, living creatures in the water, on the land and in the sky.  God spoke, and a dirt mound became a human being.  God spoke, and foreshadowing this valley of dry bones story, a rib was taken from a man, and from that one bone another totally formed and distinct human being was made.

Ezekiel would remember the most famous salvation story of his people, the story of the Exodus from Egypt.  In that event, God spoke a word through Moses and a whole sea divided away from itself, driven by a wind, and the Hebrew people walked between those walls of water on solid ground.

And at a time that was not part of Ezekiel’s memory, because it had not happened yet, was when an angel spoke God’s word to a woman named Mary, and from that word she became pregnant with the One we would call Savior and Lord.

Only words.  Spoken, invisible, terribly powerful words.

But that’s not all.  There is more.  There is another important, invisible force that is put into play in this dry bones, re-embodiment story.  It is a force that is so powerful, and so invisible, it has to be described in the terms of moving air:  wind and breath.

We are familiar with what moving air can do out here on the high plains of Kansas.  Moving air is a force with incredible strength.  It can snap trees in half.  It can destroy grain bins.  It can lift the roof right off a barn.  It can flatten a whole town.  It can ruin your seafood buffet.  It’s just air.  But given enough velocity, air becomes a devastating wind, energized into a hurricane or tornado.  Just think of the awesome power in this invisible stuff called air.

If you are dealing with emphysema, or having breathing difficulties, you know how important air is and what it does for the body and one’s energy level.  You know what happens to the body when it doesn’t get enough oxygen from the air, and how important each breath is.  You know how scary and precarious life becomes without the ability to breathe deeply, in and out.

Breath.  Holy Spirit.  Wind.  Holy Spirit.  Air.  Holy Spirit.  All the same word in the Bible.  Invisible, live giving power.  Holy Spirit.

That was the final step in the total reanimation of these bones now become bodies.  Because that’s all they were without breath, without wind, without that which the breath and the wind represent -- the Holy Spirit.  As Ezekiel noticed, the bones had become bodies, “But they had no breath in them.”

Can’t you just take in the power of that image.  Bodies that look alive but are not.  Bodies that have all the vital organs and all the bones back in place, but not life.  Bodies that are intact, and ready to be a person; but just a body does not make a person.  There is something else needed that is vital, that is essential, that is strategic before there is life:  the wind, the breath, the Spirit of God.

Again, Ezekiel’s memories race back to the creation of the first human beings.  Mud and dust is brought together to form a human, but it doesn’t become fully alive until God breathes into the nostrils of that body.  Then life begins.

Even Jesus does not fully become the Son of God until the Spirit of God descends upon him at his baptism.  Then, as in the story of the valley of dry bones, the words of God (“You are my Son...”) become mixed with the descent of the Holy Spirit, and Jesus becomes more than he was for ever after.

So many people are content to just be bodies.  All the parts are in the right places, but there is no life.  I was in line to check in at the airport, out in San Jose, on my way back from Kristin and Nics a few weeks ago.  I had my ticket, had my bag.  I was just doing the waiting shuffle with everyone else in the ticket check-in line:  stand for a few minutes, push my bag forward, stand some more, push my bag forward.  You know the routine.

Ahead of me was a fairly disheveled man.  Unshaven.  Blank expression.  Staring at everything and nothing.  Wearing an odd, Goodwill assortment of clothes.  One scarred suitcase that seemed to be stuffed with everything he possessed in life.  He finally shuffled up to the ticket agent, reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a big wad of bills and said to the agent, “Give me a ticket to...”  Then he paused for a moment, and just continued, “Give me a ticket to wherever.”

I thought to myself that though many people don’t have this outward, lost appearance, they nonetheless are just as directionless, just as purposeless.  They are bodies going through the motions with no breath of God, no Spirit to make them fully alive.

Or think of it this way.  You could get on a jet at Mid-Continent airport.  Let’s say your destination is Seattle.  You could have the pilot get you there one of two ways.  The pilot could drive you and the other couple of hundred passengers there.  It would be a bit awkward driving a 757 up I-35 and then down Interstate 70, but it could be done.  It wasn’t the intention of the inventor and builder of the airplane for it to be used in that way, but it is possible.

The other option, of course, is the pilot could fly the plane to Seattle, which is the best way, and what the plane was meant to do.  It was meant to rise up on the air and fly.

My point, clearly, is that people are meant to be more than just bodies.  We can get through life just bodily.  But isn’t it just as ridiculous as a 757 driving to Seattle instead of rising up on the wind and flying?  The process of becoming a human being is not complete until we have risen up on the breath of God, until our mere bodies have been animated with the Spirit of God.

God drives the point home to Ezekiel, and to us, after the breathing Spirit of God has brought the bodies to life.  “My people...are just like these bones,” God says to Ezekiel.  “They...are dried up, without any hope, and with no future.  So I will put my breath in them, and bring them back to life.”

Wow!  No breath, no humanity.  No breath, no purpose.  No breath, no life.  No breath, no Spirit, no connection to God.

At what point in this story do you find yourself?  Is someone looking over this vast valley of bones, and somewhere yours are all mixed up in the pile?  Are you feeling fragmented and disjointed?  Dried out?  Hopeless?  Futureless?  Do you need to hear God’s invisible, creative word spoken over your fragments, and feel them rattle back together again?

Or are you a body?  Maybe all the right parts are in the right places, but you feel like an empty shell.  Are you just walking around?  Just going through the motions, doing your work, fulfilling your obligations?  Wandering through the oncoming hours of each day with no particular purpose or direction?  Ambling up to the ticket counter of each day, saying, “Just give me a ticket to anywhere”?  Do you realize that you need something else in order to feel alive again?  In your praying, do you find yourself trying to express your need for the invisible, moving, breath and Spirit of God?

Or do you feel fully alive?  The Spirit of God has reanimated you.  Hope and a clear sense of future has given you the certainty that you are alive again.  Inspiration, faith, and love have returned.  The invisible, yet very real Spirit of God has lifted you to your feet and empowered you with another unbelievable chance at life.

Listen.  Do you hear God speaking a word to you?

The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken
Psalm 1

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost


Robert Frost's poem is a great retelling of Psalm 1.  There are choices in life.  Once we make a choice, that choice leads to options of other choices.  One fork in the road leads to other forks in the road.  Each time we choose, we will soon have to choose again.

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back."

That's the grief that comes with our choices.  Once we make one choice, that means we usually can't choose something else.  One choice necessarily excludes another, or many others.  You don't get to go back and re-choose.  You only get to move forward and make new choices.

I have always been a big "free will" guy.  I have always lauded the fact that we have free will.  We can say yes, or we can say no.  It's up to us.  Most of the time we don't fully see the consequences of our yeses and nos.  Of our choices.  Not until it's too late.  But, hey, it was our choice to make.  We make our choices based on such little information.  Yet we assume the opposite.  We think we've got all the facts straight. But it's an illusion.  A falsehood we convince ourselves of.  So  we end up rolling with the punches.  We fly by the seat of our pants.  We keep pulling up on our own bootstraps.  We keep exercising our supposed freedom.

But then it hit me.  The truth of this Psalm and of Frost's famous poem destabilized my free will world.  What choice is made that isn't built on all previous choices?  Free choice is a fairy tale.  It's a bold faced lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves think we are really in control.  That we are "free."  The truth is that every choice we have made before has directed us to all future choices, and on and on.  We have created our own fate.

And others around us, including our parents and siblings and children and friends and teachers are all making their own fateful choices that affect us as well.  Our supposedly free choices are actually wound up with so many others.  All of that sets us on a path, fates us if you will, to a certain direction, determining where we are going and how we're getting there.  There is no such thing as a totally free choice, or free will.  It's all smoke and mirrors.

This is heavy stuff, huh?  It's the stuff of Psalms and poems.  And truth.

The deeper truth of Psalm 1 and Frost's poem is about positioning.  It's not about free will or choices as much as it's about where and how you position yourself.  Where you position yourself will determine what kind of choices you get to make from then on.

Psalm 1 gives us several options as to the places where we can position ourselves.  We can position ourselves in the advice of the wicked.  We can position ourselves on the path of sinners.  We can position ourselves on the seat of mockers and cynics.

I like the way The Message opens up this Psalm:
you don't hang out at Sin Saloon,
you don't slink along Dead-End Road,
you don't go to Smart-Mouth College.

Those are three of the options of where we can position ourselves in life.  There are two more possibilities, according to Psalm 1.  We can position, or plant, ourselves by a life sustaining stream.  Or we can position ourselves with the people of God.

Seating.  Planting.  Placing.  Those are the images of the psalm.  Those images are all about positioning.  Once we have positioned ourselves in one of those options, our choices accumulate along a certain direction.  The more we choose, the more we move along that direction, the less and less we are free.  It all depends on your primary positioning.  Your starting point.

For example, if you position yourself on the seat of the scoffer, your life becomes one big sneer.  People who scoff and belittle become people who care for nothing or no one.  Positioning yourself as a scoffer turns into a sickness that trivializes everything and everyone, including God.  Negativism turns into cynicism.  Which leads to isolation and estrangement.  But what you may not recognize, at least at first, is that to position yourself on the seat of scoffers is only a diminishment and disintegration of the self.  That's a dangerous place to position yourself.

So, the question, the most important question Psalm 1 bids us ask is, "What is my primary position?"  What is my starting point?  Where do I move out from into all other future positions?

There is a connection between where you primarily position yourself and your destiny.  If you initially position yourself negatively, future choices, future forks in the road will necessarily follow a negative path.  But if your primary position has to do with planting yourself near the nourishing stream of God, or in the midst of God's people, your subsequent choices, your subsequent forks in the road will reflect that.  So there is a connection between your devotion and your destiny.  That which you are devoted to will be your destiny.  That which you are devoted to will determine your destiny.  One road or the other.

Being devoted to God means first positioning yourself in him, and then turning toward him again and again.  Being devoted to God means, possibly, positioning yourself again in him if you have chosen the wrong way.  Starting again.  Positioning yourself again.  After you have bought into evil advice.  After you have followed sinners on the wrong path.  After you have sat on the seat of those who sneer at life, and maybe even at God.  After any or all of that, you can still start again with a new primary position beside the stream of God, and within the place of the people of God.

To be devoted to God, to make God your primary position, your primary starting point is to refuse every temptation to turn to the advice or the way or the seat of those who would keep you from that place.  To be devoted to God as your primary position in life is to become devotedly stubborn in your unwillingness to serve, obey, or even listen to the option of any other primary position.

Maybe your first and last free choice is the one you make about your primary position, from which you will travel down that road of life.  As Robert Frost says in the last line of his poem, that primary positioning "has made all the difference."

I Love You, Man!

"I Love You, Man!" John 15:9-17 I looked for some commercials that I could show to start out this message about love. Even though the commercials are selling some product, they are also selling a message, or an understanding about our culture. And often those subliminal messages are about what love is. Some of the commercials I found on YouTube weren't exactly what I was looking for. The one's that came close were the Axe body spray commercials that depict love as nothing but animalistic, sexual desire. But the commercials were so blatantly sexual, I couldn't in good conscience show them in church. Then I ran across some old Bud Light commercials. The old, "I love you, man" commercials. Remember those? They were about a loser named Johnny who was always trying to manipulate a Bud Light out of someone. Here's one of those commercials: (show the one where Johnny is proposing to a girl on the hillside) Here are some of the unspoken themes behind the way this run of Bud Light commercials depict love: --love is only something you profess when you want something out of someone else; --love is shallow; --love is self-centered; --love is words without any substance; --love is a game; --love is deception. How do we live a life of Christian love in a distorted commercial world? How does Christian love differ from the shallow, bumper sticker slogan kind of love? What is the difference between a Bud Light commercial saying, "I love you, man," and Jesus' "...love one another just as I love you"? These kinds of questions have been asked ever since the Christian gospel was first preached. What's the difference between how Christian's live life and love, and how culture tells people how to live and love? In the first letter of John, thought to be the same John who wrote this gospel, he taught how the world's kind of love had more to do with lustful cravings, self-centeredness, and material goods. (Certainly the Axe body spray has picked up on those themes.) John begged his listeners, through his three letters not to base their love on that which will pass away, but on the eternal will of God. It's evidently a hard lesson to learn. We, in our culture, are having to learn it over and over again. I'd like to direct our attention to Jesus' farewell statement to his disciples. In his final teaching to the disciples he says a lot about what love is. This farewell statement takes up chapters 14 through 17 in the Gospel of John. The part that was read in the 15th chapter falls right in the middle. Jesus is saying good-bye. He's trying to bring loose ends together. He's trying to sum up all that he has been about. He wants to make sure the disciples have gotten it. He wants to know that what the disciples will be carrying out and carrying on with after he has gone to be with the Father God is the right stuff. Right in the middle of this tearfully moving speech, Jesus talks about what love is. One of the best movies of the past few years is Forrest Gump. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when Forrest proposes to Jenny. Jenny is on the stairs of his home. He has been in love with Jenny his whole life. She had looked for love in all the wrong places. At one point in the movie she told Forrest he didn't know what love was. But, in truth, she was the one mixed up about love. Forrest stood at the base of the stairwell and said, "Will you marry me, Jenny?" Then he paused, and answered her statement from earlier in the movie, "I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is." Jenny looked down at him and all the waste and guilt from her life, ill spent by chasing after love through casual sex and drug abuse came through her reply: "Oh, Forrest, you don't want to marry someone like me." Jesus is making the same kind of statement to his disciples that Forrest is to Jenny: "I may not appear to be a very smart man, or it may not appear that I'm doing a very smart thing by laying my life down, but I know what love is. And I want to make sure you know what love is, so you don't waste time trying to find out in the wrong way." Jesus says twice in these verses, "Love one another." In between the two statements are a number of ways that Jesus wanted his disciples to do that. Jesus tells the disciples that they can show the depth of their love for him by being obedient--by following his rules. Part of being loving has to do with following rules. By being obedient to those rules. That may not sound quite right. Doesn't love have to do with freedom and privileges and choices? As I thought about Jesus' statements, I realized that love in terms of rules and obedience means at least two things. First, love is intentional. Love as obedience--in this case, obedience to Jesus--means that the person who is loving intends to be loving, intends to give up some of their selfish rights. Love means making a conscious choice, an intentional decision, to be loving; of giving up the self in loving service and relationship to another. Most couples don't like to include the word, "obey" in their marriage vows anymore. It is the one word that makes people think about what it is exactly they are saying to each other. If they are going to obey somebody, they want to be sure they understand what that means. To obey someone is to turn yourself over to them. That's a scary thought in our individualistic, self-empowerment culture. When we hear the word obedience in relation to a man-woman relationship, we immediately think of a middle eastern, al-qaeda kind of relationship where the woman must walk behind her husband, never go out without him, and can be beaten severely if she displeases him. But what are we doing in being obedient to our Lord Jesus? To turn ourselves over to him. To let him set the agenda for our lives. To give him the power and say in what we do, and how we do it. To give him the upper hand in the decision making of our daily living. Why isn't that just as scary to us? Or is it? I think it shouldn't be scary because we are giving ourselves over to him in obedience knowing that we are loved and cherished by the one we are obeying. It's a mixture of love and obedience in which we are willing to give up our control into the control of someone who loves us deeply. Secondly, by linking love with commands and obedience, I think Jesus is trying to make the point that love happens best within certain boundaries. Love between people doesn't give them the freedom to behave however they wish. In marriage, for example, love needs the boundary of fidelity. If there is no trust that the partners are going to be faithful and single-minded to the relationship, how can there be love? How can love grow when the boundary of fidelity has been, or is constantly being, breached? Do you see what I'm saying here; what Jesus is saying here? Commands and obedience are far from negative things in love. They form the border around love so that love can flourish. If love is a painting, the commands and obedience are the frame around the picture to enhance the painting. Another point Jesus made about love is that it is willing to put itself on the line for someone else. Fear isn't allowed to get in the way of loving. Love faces scary situations and does what it has to do, even to the point of self-sacrifice. During the excavations of the ruins of Pompeii, one of the remains found in that volcano devastated city told it's own story. Petrified in the volcanic ash was the body of a crippled boy. One foot was clearly disfigured. Around the body of the boy was a woman's arm. It was a finely shaped arm with bracelets and jewelry. The arm that was stretched around the boy to save or comfort the boy was all that was preserved of the woman's body. Imagine the story behind that helping arm and the crippled boy that we'll never know. Imagine a love that was willing to put herself in harms way, despite the fact that both perished. A more modern version of that story is that of Stephanie Decker who had parts of both legs amputated and also suffered multiple rib fractures and a punctured lung. In describing what happened to her, Decker said two tornadoes hit her home in an outlying area of Henryville, Indiana, this past March. She realized a tornado was coming straight at the home and took the children to the basement. She wrapped son and daughter in a comforter. "I was around my children, holding them tight, as the pillars, steel beams, the bricks, everything from the house was hitting me in the back," she recalled. She said a large steel beam landed on her, nearly severing a leg. "I saw a brick coming at my daughter's direction," she said. "So I would maneuver my back, left and right, almost like dodging, so I would take the hit and not my daughter or my son. I can remember the pain of it hitting my back on both sides and my arms. But I focused on holding them." Because of her, both children are alive and totally unhurt. Unfortunately she lost parts of both legs. Every time Stephanie's children look at her amputated legs and watch her struggle to walk on prosthetic legs, they know the price she paid to sacrifice herself for them. Two mothers, centuries apart, but self-sacrificial in their love. Jesus said there was no greater love than that kind of love. Maybe going to that length out of love is too much to think about. Total self-sacrifice is probably unimaginable to most people. That is until you are in the situation where you are in the position to protect your children while a tornado is ripping your house apart. Probably not until that moment would we know if we would be able to make that kind of sacrifice out of love. Something else that Jesus infers in these words about love is that love is learned by modeling. "Love one another," Jesus said, "just as I have loved you." People become loving by having love modeled for them by someone who knows what love is. Part of what Jesus is saying here is that love, or being a loving person, does not come naturally, as if we were born with it. Some people do not grow up having love modeled in a positive way. The poet Elizabeth Barrett grew up under a tyrannical father. He exemplified the epitome of the kind of demanded obedience we all cringe from. He severely punished any opposition to his will. For many years she buried her resentment and anger. She became a sick and pitiful recluse. Eventually she became an invalid, whose only outlet was writing her poetry. One day she was visited by a man named Robert Browning. In just one visit he gave her so much joy and happiness that she lifted her head from her pillow. On his second visit she sat up in bed. On his third visit they ran away and eloped. Just seeing a different model of love was enough to arouse Elizabeth Barrett to a new life. Jesus gave the disciples, which includes us, the invitation to learn from him, to model his way of loving. I want to be careful here not to minimize Jesus, by only making him out to be a role model for love. He was, of course, much more than that--He is the Savior of God. But part of the heart of his saving message had to do with modeling how to develop a healthy, loving relationship with God and with each other. There is so much here, in Jesus' statements about loving others and being in a love relationship. I just want to highlight one more. The main point that Jesus' double statement, "Love one another," says to me is that love is not a warm feeling you hold in your heart. Love is an outwardly focused, active emotion. Love is not an individual, internal kind of warm fuzzy, but instead evokes a person to action in a relationship. Think about it. Love comes to the surface when you are with someone else and have an object for your love. In Guideposts magazine, Thomas Malone reported about a study he did. Malone found that the people with the most emotional problems were those who went through life, screaming in some way, "Please, somebody, love me." On the other hand, people who were mentally healthy were those who went through life looking for someone to love and to show love to. People became mentally healthy when they stopped their "me-centered" selfish screaming, and went about the task of showing love to another human being. Then they found the love they had been screaming for came around to them. But they had to demonstrate love first to get the love they were seeking. The friendship kind of love that Jesus says is available to us is only by loving one another, by letting ourselves go, and risking over and over, some demonstration of that love for someone else. To not let your love be outward bound toward others not only makes it not love, it also creates emotional consequences that are scary. The love that Jesus wanted his disciples to see, the kind of love he modeled as the Savior, was so different from the culture-at-large. It's not the, "I love you, man," kind of love that ends up being sappy, shallow, and self-centered. Jesus' kind of love is not just a bunch of words without substance. It is a throbbing with life kind of love, that energizes both the lover and the beloved. And it was vital to Jesus, as he was saying goodbye, that his followers understood the difference and followed his way.

When The Chariot Is Offered, Get In

"When The Chariot Is Offered, Get In"
Acts 8:26-40


Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting off Facebook.  I’ve never been a big fan, anyway.  I have become increasingly uncomfortable about putting even a little bit of myself out there in some kind of splashy self-disclosure.  I have friends that throw nearly everything they do on their Facebook page, every meal they eat, every movement or facial expression of their two children.  I just don’t see the point.  I am becoming less and less infatuated with myself as I grow older.  And yet our culture is becoming more and more narcissistic, as if we are more and more under the delusion that everyone must be interested in what we are doing or thinking.  I find my life to be much too boring to splash any of it out there for people to see.

Blogging is another part of this whole social media phenomenon.  How many don’t know what blogging is?  Blog is a shortened word, compressing two terms: web log.  Web logs, or blogs, were started by a couple of teenagers on an obscure web site.  They started writing their personal diary of personal activities and thoughts hanging it out there for anyone to read.  No one knew who they were, but anyone could read their blog--all their deep dark secrets and the daily activities of their lives.  It quickly caught on as a way for people to totally disclose their inner selves (or make something up), and yet do it without anyone know who they are.

Now blogging has caught on to such an extent that millions of people are doing it.  They aren’t trying to keep themselves invisible like the original two teenagers did, but want everyone to know who they are.  We don’t have reporters anymore, but bloggers.  People are now professional bloggers!  So, somehow the news is not just the news, but someone’s personal take on the news.  Opinion and news mixed together.  We have become a society of social voyeurs, reading and checking in with people’s personal lives and thoughts through their blog, without every knowing them.

I just think it’s all fascinating, psychologically.  People wanting others to know what’s going on in their lives and heads, but at the same time keeping their identity hidden.  It seems to me that people have a great need to be heard, to have someone listen to their story.  At the same time, I think people, by telling their story, are deeply longing for guidance and wisdom about their stories.  They’re trying to figure out what their story means, what the meaning of certain events were, and to come to some understanding of how everything fits together.  And, basically, where it’s all going.

Philip was one of those kinds of people who God used as just that kind of spiritual guide.  The Holy Spirit propelled him from place-to-place, putting him in contact with people who needed to be listened to, who needed God’s guidance.

One occasion was with the Ethiopian who had been reading from the prophet Isaiah.  The Ethiopian was spiritually hungry and needing someone to hear his story and help him make sense of it.  It’s not hard to be a Philip for others.  All it takes is the willingness to listen, and then let the Spirit guide your conversation.

A few years ago, I flew out to Seattle to attend a Presbyterian Men’s Conference.  Earl Palmer, Senior Pastor of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle was the main speaker, and he is always worth the journey.

The three months prior to my trip were emotionally draining.  In one two-and-a-half week stretch I had 6 funerals.  It was unbelievable.  I was looking forward to just relaxing, and being fed spiritually on this trip--not having to be the Pastor for the week.

But in my prayers, just before leaving, I prayed something I shouldn’t have prayed.  It fell within the bounds of the old saying, “Never ask something of God that he just might give you.”  The prayer I prayed was that God would somehow use me during the week.

I flew out of Omaha to Denver for the first leg of the trip.  When I checked in, the gate attendant looked up at me and said, “Whoa, we need to put you in a different seat.”  She got me into the exit row so I could have more leg room.  I found out God put me there for a different reason.

When I settled into my aisle seat, there was a young (20 something) woman in the window seat.  No one was sitting between us.  During the flight she sat and stared out the window.  I kind of settled back and started reading a Newsweek magazine that had a feature article about the power of prayer.

After we had been in the air for a while, she pulled out a Bible and began reading.  I thought, “Oh, boy.”  She would read for a few minutes, place her hand on her Bible’s pages, let out a deep sigh, and look out the window.  After she had done this a few times, I thought, “Oh, boy.”  And I remembered my prayer earlier that morning.  I, with slight reluctance, turned to her and said, “I see you’re reading the Good Book.”
“Oh yes,” she replied.  “It’s the best book.”
“Are you a Christian?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and then asked if I was a Christian.  I said that I most assuredly am.
I asked her what she was reading, and she read to me out of the first chapter of Isaiah:
This is God’s Message:
If your sins are blood-red,
they’ll be snow-white.
If they’re red like crimson,
they’ll be like wool.
If you’ll willingly obey,
you’ll feast like kings.
But if you’re willful and stubborn,
you’ll die like dogs.
That’s right.  God says so.  (1:18-20)

I asked her why those were the verses she was reading, and what particular meaning she was finding in them.  She went silent for about three or four minutes, shaking her head back and forth, looking at me, looking down at her Bible, shaking her head back and forth.  All the while patting the pages of her Bible.  I thought to myself, “Oh, boy.”

Then she spoke.  She told me the story of how she had had a falling out with her mother as a teenager.  She had run away from home.  While hitchhiking to Florida, she was picked up by a couple of men who raped her.  She explained to me how she had always felt guilty about that, as if the rape was somehow her fault.  She had worked through some of those feelings, but it was clear they were still plaguing her.  She had never told her mother what happened.  Had barely talked to her mother since running away, but was traveling now to see her mother again.  That was one of the reasons she was reading Isaiah’s words about being washed “white as snow.”

She was struggling with the will of God in some other matters in her life.  She was faced with a decision that she anticipated would bring a lot of disorientation in her life.  She wanted to make the right choice.  She wanted to be sure she was paying attention to the voice of the Lord as she made her decision.

Just like the Ethiopian to Philip, she was saying to me, “How can I know without some help?”  Like the Ethiopian, she was allowing me into her chariot to help her understand what she was reading, and to guide her in her life direction.  And at the same time she was trying to help me understand what she saw in the scripture and why it was so important to her.  I chatted with her about both the situations she was struggling with.

After a while she asked me what my work was.  I told her I was a Pastor.  She laughed and said, “And here I was asking you if you were a Christian, but you’re a pastor!”  She thought that was funny.  I did too.  I asked if we could pray together, and as the plane was landing in Denver, we joined hands and I prayed for the healing of her past and that awful memory, as well as the choice she would have to make about a life shift.  And she prayed for my ministry.  She went her way, and I went mine.  Just two lives intersecting for a time by God’s bidding, brought about by the rearranging of my seat assignment by an unsuspecting gate attendant.

On my flight from Denver to Seattle, I struck up a conversation with a woman who had been staying with her daughter in Denver.  Her daughter had come down with a TB-like disease and had almost died.  The woman was clearly worn out from watching her grandchildren and watching her only daughter almost die of a mysterious disease.

“Then,” said the woman, “to top all that off, we have a cat.  It’s 15 years old and it’s nine lives have long been spent.  We just recently spent $600 keeping it alive.  My husband called just before I left Denver to tell me he had to have our cat put to sleep.”

It was clear the woman had a deep attachment to that cat and was experiencing deep grief.  She had almost lost her daughter, and now lost her cat.  In her mind she was approaching the loss of her cat with the somewhat logical point of view that, “If I’m going to have to lose a beloved on this trip, I’d rather it be my cat than my daughter.”

Then she curtly said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”  She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes.  After the plane landed and everyone got up trying to get off like a bunch of claustrophobics, I pulled inside myself and said a quick prayer for the woman and her family, for her grief, and that the Holy Spirit would be with her and her daughter.  And I thanked God again that he had allowed me to get into another person’s chariot.


While at the conference, I got into a conversation at lunch one day with a young Korean pastor.  He was just starting out in ministry.  He had so much energy and enthusiasm about doing the Lord’s work.  He asked me all kinds of questions that compared my rural ministry with his inner city ministry experience.

He wanted to do ministry so well.  His strategy was to involve the whole congregation at once in big projects.  Like building a Habitat For Humanity house.  Instead of splitting the congregation up into small groups, which is the current “cool” way of doing ministry, he wanted everyone to work together.

He asked some important questions about the role of the minister and how to avoid the potholes many ministers fall into.  We talked for about an hour and a half during lunch and beyond.  It was probably one of the most energizing conversations I had the whole conference.  He gleaned some wisdom from my many years of experience.  And I re-caught from him some of the enthusiasm for serving Christ.  In a way, the Holy Spirit led us into each other’s chariots, and we both went away blessed.  I never saw him again during the conference after our conversation.

On the way home, I had a two hour lay over in Denver.  When I got there, I discovered my flight to Omaha had been arbitrarily canceled.  I had to get booked on another airline going that direction.  I should have realized I was being set up again for an invitation into yet another chariot.

I went to the gate from which my new flight would depart, and started my long wait.  I did some people watching, and then pulled out my journal to write down some reflections about my week.

A middle-aged woman sat down across from me and noticed my journal.  She asked if it was a journal.  I told her it was.  She asked me what I used it for.  I told her it was my most therapeutic tool; that I kept my journal most faithfully during the times of crisis in my life when I needed to be able to look back and put some pieces together.  Gain some perspective.  That I used it to try and discern how God was working and moving in my life.  Discovering God’s invisible hand in my very visible and sometimes chaotic life.

She said, “Maybe I should do something like that.”  I asked her what she would write about.  She looked down at the stained carpet at her feet for a long time.  Then she looked up and said, “I’ve been courageously trying to look back at a painful time in my life.”  She stopped and stared at me for a moment, trying to assess if I was a safe person to say more about that.  Her assessment done, she said, “I began to be sexually abused when I was five and six years old.”  My heart ached for her as she told me her story and how utterly painful it was, even for me as I listened to it.

She began to cry and through her tears she asked me some angry questions:  “Where was God then?  Why wasn’t God protecting me?  Why did God let it happen over and over?”

I was quickly in tears, crying with the woman I had just met at an airport gate.  She was covered with guilt and shame and anger, like an oil that no soap could wash off no matter how hard and how many times she had scrubbed.

I talked to her about, how, when I wrestled with those kinds of questions, I do so through prayer.  We talked about prayer, and how her journal writing could be a form of praying.  How it’s OK to shake your fist at God sometimes.  To cry out your laments.  To even, through our journal, wish pain and worse upon those who had been your tormentors.  That all of that is splayed across the pages of the Bible, especially the Psalms.  I told her that I believed that even though she was angry at God, and that God was big enough to take her anger, it was by God, ultimately, that she would find her healing.

I prayed quietly with her, and I don’t know if she was comforted by my counsel or not.  The announcement came over the PA that it was the last call to board my flight.  I hadn’t been paying attention, and now I had to go and be spirited away by a Boeing 737.  I had to leave her there still with tears trickling down her cheeks.


All in all, an amazing week.  They were all one time conversations, deeply personal, with people who deeply desired for someone to hear and care about their stories, but not through some anonymous blog.  All opportunities provided by God.


The Ethiopian left his encounter with Philip a changed man, a man baptized as a Christian convert.  Had Philip prayed, “Use me, Lord, somehow this day, this week?”  I don’t know if I left any of those people changed.  I only know I tried to be faithful to God in the opportunities--the chariots, if you will--that God placed me in.  I find myself playing out the role of Philip often enough, especially when I ask God to give me opportunity.

There are other times I am the Ethiopian.  I’m having a hard time understanding things, or need counsel as I face my own difficulties.  I know that God will maneuver someone my way, to jump into my chariot and help me according to my need.

I know that all of us disciples are available to each other, as God spirits us into some contact, some opportunity for face-to-face conversation that will help another person connect with God.  To help another person move closer to God’s healing and truth.  May the Lord use you in that work, as you purpose to make yourself available.  When you sense the opportunity, may you take advantage of it.  In other words, when the chariot is offered, get in.