sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 05/11/2014
video available at www.sundaystreams.com/go/MilanVineyard
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[childhood word-twisting example... “Mom said you had to let me have it.”]
Setting aside my deceitfulness for the time being, what interests me in that experience is how my sister knew that wasn’t what Mom said. How did she know? She knew Mom. And something felt off in my report about what Mom was saying. It didn’t sound like Mom to her. And then, a little later, when I heard my mom say my name – “Jesse” – I heard a lot more than my name. I knew everything she was saying. I was busted. How did I know? I knew my mom’s voice. I’d been listening to it my whole life. Even if her voice had been muffled and distant, I would have known what she was saying.
Which brings us to Alive // Life After Easter. Human beings – you and me-encountering a living God, alive in all the ways we think about being fully alive. Engaging in up-close and personal relationship with us, a relationship that wakes us up to all the life around us, and brings us to life, and gives a new way to live and a new purpose for living. Because at the center of encounters between living beings, and relationships especially, is communication.
Alive // Life After Easter is about a life in relationship with the living God primarily experienced through the Spirit of God. the energetically animating, non-material, foundationally real, sensually transcendent personal presence who is full of divine creativity, divine order, divine wholeness, divine favor, divine love, and divine goodness. We’re talking about the Holy Spirit, one of the Threeness that is the One God, along with the Father and the Son. Called in the scriptures the Counselor, the Come-Along-Sider. Showing up in the Bible variously and mysteriously in connection with fire or a cloud or a bird or oil. And most especially as the breath or wind of God, the one who blows where he pleases and whom it pleases to come among us with personal intentions and new creation purpose, and who desires to speak to us, to send us on our way, and to fill us.
Revisiting our main text that we read last week…
In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off.
Acts 13:1-3
While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said…
The Holy Spirit said.
Say what? Say how?
Let me give you the whole answer in four and a half words:
I don’t know, exactly.
Normal human speech is pretty awesome. Electrons are firing around in your brain, traveling down axons and stimulating the release of neurotransmitters which zoom across synapses to the next neuron’s dendrites, all of these electro-chemical impulses speeding at up to 268 miles per hour, eventually forming intentional movement of the diaphragm and vocal chords and tongue, shaping vibrations in the air that we call words.
These words travel through air molecules as sound waves which strike our eardrums and are translated back again into electrochemical impulses that our neural networks interpret as sounds. If we have enough experience with those particular patterns of sound and the relationship they usually have with our external and internal worlds, we have an experience of meaning. And more electrons fire and more neurotransmitters cross more synapses, and something of the what originator of the speech intended to communicate is more often than not, miraculously, understood by the hearer.
But that’s not precisely what’s going on here in Acts 13, is it?
The Holy Spirit is spirit, as we talked about last weekend. The Holy Spirit has will and intention and desire and emotion and personality and intelligence and the capacity to communicate, but the Holy Spirit is also non-material, non-physical. The Spirit, so far as I am aware, doesn’t have a diaphragm and vocal chords and a tongue with which to vibrate and shape air and create sound waves that vibrate our ear drums. Which makes things that much more interesting.
Which isn’t to say the God’s spirit isn’t capable of interacting with and influencing the natural, physical world. Far from it. Matter and energy were preceded by and created by the Spirit, so there is no doubt that the Holy Spirit can have his way with them. It’s just that the ways in which he has his way are mysterious ways. [u2 mysterious ways song is about the Holy Spirit…she moves in mysterious ways…]
When Luke writes the Holy Spirit said, he’s reporting an experience of divine communication by these worshipping and fasting disciples of Jesus that isn’t likely to be quite the same as the kind of speech or verbal communication that we normally experience human being to human being. Nonetheless, for Luke, this kind of divine communication has at least 4 things in common with our understanding of “saying.”
(1) that God’s Spirit had something he wanted to say, and (2) he used some means of communication to transmit his message, and (3) that the disciples became aware of something that they perceived to be communication from God’s Spirit, and (4) that they understood the message as direction to set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which God’s Spirit was inviting them.
For the disciples, and for us too, of course, it all starts with number 3 – we become aware of something that we perceive to be communication from God’s Spirit.
How? How do we become aware? How do we recognize it as the Holy Spirit?
I don’t know, exactly.
For me, the idea of dimensions a helpful way of getting at what seems to be going on.
Our lives take place within the 3 spatial dimensions of height, width, length and the 4th dimension of time. Yet scientists tell us the universe contains many more dimensions than this; it’s just that we don’t experience or have access to them.
It seems reasonable that God may well inhabit and have access to all of these extra dimensions, and would therefore be capable of being present among us, right here, right now, all the time, in fact, but we would be generally unaware of it.
Sort of like if we imagined that we existed in a 2-dimensional flat-land. Like drawings on a piece of paper.
What if a three dimensional being wanted to get our attention, and put his finger on the paper? We wouldn’t be able to see it as a finger, more like as a spot appearing in our world. Or what if that being spoke? We wouldn’t hear him – we couldn’t “hear” anything – but our world might well vibrate in some way in response, and that just might be perceivable, and profoundly mysterious.
Perhaps something like that is going on in the world after Easter. God is increasingly interacting with our dimensions in ways perceivable by us, leading us to life and bringing us to life with the kind of life that raised Jesus from the dead, embodied in a new kind of physical existence, equally at home in both our dimensions and God’s.
Take that if it’s helpful, leave it behind if it’s not.
Here’s what I do know.
I do know the Spirit of God wants to communicate with us. The Holy Spirit wants us to know the forgiveness and favor and love of the living, wise, wild, just, holy, awesome God. The Holy Spirit wants to teach us and remind us of and reveal to us the way of our strong and humble King Jesus. The Holy Spirit wants to direct us and send us and deliver grace-filled messages on his behalf to hurting and hoping and despairing and disconnected and disfavored and discounted people.
And because the Holy Spirit is spirit, and each one of us is, for lack of a better word, uniquely wired, we may hear his voice in a limitless variety of ways.
For example…
What people will often call a sense, or impression. Like a thought combined with a feeling of leading or instruction or urgency. Could come out of the blue, in a conversation with someone, when seeing somebody, while thinking about something or praying, when reading the scriptures.
A feeling in your gut.
A dream.
A picture or vision.
A thought that you can’t shake.
What seems like someone talking in your head – still in thought form, but not quite like your own thoughts.
What seems like an audible voice, but not coming from anyone else’s mouth, and not necessarily heard by anyone else.
Someone else saying something but it lands differently, almost like their words have some extra oomph behind them, piercing to a different place in you.
A set of connections all at once falling into place, and a dawning certainty of the next right step.
A circumstance or sequence of circumstances that say something to you [prayer/arrest story…]
Being emotionally moved beyond what you would normally expect when you hear something or become aware of a circumstance or think about a group of people.
A growing desire that time and/or inattention and/or competing desires don’t seem to kill. Especially if it’s a desire that leads you outside of your comfort zone.
A physical sensation without an obvious natural cause. Chills, shiver, warmth, heat, breeze, tingle, lightness, weight – sometimes even pain.
This is mostly pretty natural, non-spooky, non-sensational stuff isn’t it? Which is what people saw in Jesus’ life. There was extraordinary activity of God going on in and through him and his actions, but he wasn’t at all weird or manipulative or super religious or amped up. His language was normal, his bearing was normal – he was what many like to call naturally supernatural. He’s the one we learn from and imitate, as best as we can.
Of course, one of the most challenging things about how natural it all is, is this: How do we know it’s the Spirit of God and not just us?
4 words.
I don’t know, exactly.
But I’m pretty sure I can point you in the right direction.
There is one woman in our lives whose voice nearly all of us would recognize without fail.
[play “hey Mama” verse 2…]
(song charted in the top 10 despite never being released as a single – tells you about our connection to our moms, doesn’t it?)
We recognize the Holy Spirit’s voice in much the same way we recognize our mother’s voice.
How do you know it’s your mother on the other end of the phone?
She’s got a particular way of talking to you, doesn’t she…? She’s got language she tends to use with you, doesn’t she…? She’s got things she would be likely to say and things she wouldn’t say in a million years, doesn’t she…?
Here’s the thing about our birth mothers: before we know anything else about them, we know their voice. Before we know what they look like, what they smell like, what they taste like, what they feel like, we know what they sound like.
[progression of fetal senses in womb: sensitivity to touch during end of 7th week, taste 13-15 weeks, smell at 11-14 weeks, hearing at 18 weeks, vision last to develop at 26 weeks when your eyes open for the first time, but you can’t touch, taste, smell or see your mother until after you’re born… however, you are recognizing and preferring mother’s voice to stranger at 25 weeks, heartbeat changing.]
How can you recognize the Holy Spirit’s voice? In many of the same ways you recognize your mother’s voice.
It just might be the Holy Spirit if…
You just know it’s God’s Spirit.
One evening, Jesus told an inquisitive man named Nicodemus that we must be “born” of the Spirit.
Life After Easter truly is a new life. Life that enters into its fullness, like our first, biological life, with birth. If we put our trust in Jesus, commit ourselves to his way of being in this world and his way of loving our neighbors and his way of loving God, if we repent and believe his good news of God’s kingdom, if we let go of our lives and our sin and hold on to his life and his goodness, then we experience a new birth. Which implies, doesn’t it, that when we become a new creation, that new creation takes place in a different womb than the one in which we were first created. New creation begins in God’s womb.
Something of the process of new creation gives us the capacity to recognize the Holy Spirit’s voice, the Spirit who gives birth to us.
You just know, even if you can’t explain it. We’ve been hearing the Holy Spirit’s voice our whole lives, even if just now we’re becoming aware of the person to whom the voice is attached.
Something comes into your heart or mind when God is near.
You’re praying. Worshipping. In church. Walking in the mountains. Serving the poor. Etc. Sometimes the Spirit speaks out of the blue, of course. But pay special attention when you’re already aware of his presence.
The usual suspects are ruled out.
You know what you tend to think about. You know the messages playing like a broken record in your brain. You know the weaknesses you have that the enemy of your soul likes to exploit.
If what you’re sensing/hearing/thinking is different from any of those things and is consistent with the message and agenda of Jesus, it just might be the Holy Spirit.
You can’t shake it.
A Jesus-consistent idea came into your head, or a Jesus-consistent emotion came into your heart, and now it won’t go away. Somebody said something to you, and you can’t stop thinking about what they said (and not because it hurt your feelings).
Your brothers and sisters in the community of faith affirm or confirm the message you’re hearing.
Don’t be embarrassed. Ask for help. Bounce what you’re hearing off others and ask for their feedback. Your brothers and sisters in God’s family love you, and have the same mother you have, and they can help you discern his voice.
Fruit follows. Trusting and/or acting on what you hear produces “the fruit of the spirit” in your life or someone else’s life. (Galatians 5:22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.) This is the real test.
Love
Joy
Peace
Patience (long-suffering)
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
Self-Control
These are particular directions the Spirit is always blowing. If the voice you are hearing is blowing you in a different direction, it’s not the Spirit of God. [dreams…]
When in doubt, ask, wait & listen some more.
It’s up to the Spirit to make himself clear enough to us for us to act. It’s up to us to practice listening enough that when the Spirit is speaking, we’re paying attention. Fear not, with perseverance, you will start getting the hang of it.
Once the Spirit has made himself clear enough, …
Go. Do. See what happens.
There will always be a wind at your back if you take steps in direction of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Against such things there is no law. In other words, why not give it a shot if you think it’s the Spirit’s voice moving you in that direction? What have you got to lose?
If it leads to one of the above, or to repentance, or healing, or encouragement, or new creation, you’re learning to listen to and to recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit.
If it doesn’t, you’re learning too.
And either way, your mother will be proud of you.
Practical Suggestion:
Listen with Music + Silence. Pick a song you really enjoy (preferably one that helps you connect with God in some way), ask the Holy Spirit to make you aware of his/her presence and to speak to you, and then stay in silence for a length of time equal to the song after, continuing to listen. Make note of any feelings/experiences/thoughts/sensations and repeat each day this week. Compare your notes at the end of the week.
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