Text: Acts 2:17-18
Focus: Imagine
Function: To help people see the blessing we got from Annual conference worship.
17‘In
the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my
Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and
your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see
visions,
and your old men shall dream
dreams.
18Even
upon my slaves, both men and women,
in
those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and
they shall prophesy.
Good morning to the beloved children of God.
Today, we are looking at the theme passage from last week’s Annual Conference of the Church which Carol and I attended.
There were a total of 5 worship services and all of them were inspiring and were centered on the theme: Imagine.
I love the idea of Imagine because I believe that is one of the places the Holy Spirit lives inside of us to give us hope in the power of what is possible by faith.
We don’t just imagine that God exists, we imagine what is possible because we live by faith in what God can do.
Our text points us to what God can do through the Spirit.
The passage is Peter trying to explain to the crowd what has just happened when the mighty wind shook Jerusalem and the tongues of fire fell on the 120 believers who were gathered together.
Peter repeats a prophecy from Joel chapter 2 telling them that this was simply God fulfilling God’s promise to us.
And he promises that we will have visions and dreams and then we will speak and bring those things about.
Imagine a better world and then commit ourselves to prayer and action to make it happen.
The visions and the dreams given to us are the leading of God by the Spirit in the hearts of God’s people and they can be wild.
I am reminded of a sermon I preached based on a sign at a Lutheran Church I drive by while Ubering. The sign says: “God’s Work, Our Hands” and Jody made us all little signs to hang on the wall depicting that phrase. Mine hangs on the wall just to my right of me when I am writing my sermons.
When we look at the way the Spirit empowers us according to 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4, we see that God is the one who is at work in us.
Does that mean we won’t fail?
I imagine what it would be like to never fail. I don’t believe that is what he is talking about. He is talking about how God is the one who opens the doors and sets the circumstances right for us to do God’s work in our lives.
But that idea of never failing is there because God is the one who picks us up when we fall. As a matter of fact, when you read the stories in the OT of the people of faith, you see that at times they seemed to go backwards on their quest and God was behind it because God wanted them to depend on God’s power and not their own resources.
God is looking for willing participants in God’s plan.
When I think of God’s work and Our hands, I think of the willingness that we have to listen and do what we are feeling God is leading us to do.
I think one of the things that helped me see God at work in our church was listening to the stories of pastors from other churches that are similar to ours.
One preacher told us that it isn’t sour grapes to look at our size and wonder about what it means when we see mega churches with programming that fits every niche of their constituents so that people’s felt needs are being met.
He didn’t, and I won’t criticize the faith of anyone else either, because I believe that God leads us.
But he went on to talk of the love and community given to us by God in our smaller churches. More than that, he pointed out that we are a different people and that uniqueness makes us who we are and we should be happy because God is faithful and is working and does have a plan for us.
The motto of the Church is “Following Jesus, simply, peaceably, and together.” Even our motto reflects our need for community and the help and aid that we get from each other.
When Paul speaks of the moving of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12, he gives to us a body image. Let me read verses 12-13 and verses 25-26 from the Message:
12-13You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
25-26The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
Our community makes us grow.
And I believe God’s power is behind it.
And our text from the book of Acts is the prophecy about our power as a Church.
We dream of a better world and then we prophesy, or speak it into existence.
And in this day and age, the message of unconditional love for our neighbors doesn’t sit well when our neighbors are accused of being something different from us. We are told by the culture to hate the other side because they are destroying our values. We are told to hate those who while fleeing for their lives broke the law even though it was life and death for them. We are told it is okay to hate them.
But praise God it isn’t that way in our church. We are told to love those who are different from us. That is what community building is about and that is where the Spirit is moving and blessing churches.
The final message on Thursday, the speaker imagined Jesus washing Judas’s feet with both of them knowing that Judas was going to hand Jesus over to death. Jesus loved him till the end.
We are different from the culture, the world, around us.
The culture teaches us to arm ourselves and get revenge, that somehow more violence will stop violence. We have a better way, we love and forgive our enemies to the point of washing their feet.
I imagine the Spirit giving us that kind of power to love.
