Life from Chaos

selected newsprints from Dot Exercise, Lunch & Conversation with the Strategic Planning Team.

And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” –Acts of the Apostles 2:8-11

The Day of Pentecost, if I had been there, would have been an uncomfortable experience. I think I speak for most Presbyterians. The day’s events were less orderly and more chaotic than we are used to.

Many who participated felt the same way. It may have been the most change-resistant in the crowd who sneered and said those speaking in other languages were drunk. Even those who were open to new ideas felt confused about what it all meant. Nearly everyone was “amazed and astonished” because the new thing happening did not meet their expectations about what should happen.

During the past year, the Strategic Planning Team has led an effort to discern what new thing God is doing in and through our church. With the help of the session and others among us, the team established three general goals. We call one of them “the evangelism goal,” for short, with a concrete objective to hold an event like today’s lunch and conversation.  The associate pastor was to have a primary leadership role, but now there’s no associate pastor. An area pastor was consulted about a leadership role, but redirected us with the challenge I told you about in the sermon two weeks ago. Your pastor is co-leading the effort, but has just returned from a week with family in a health crisis. Frankly, our progress has felt a little confusing, chaotic, two steps forward, one step back.

Maybe that’s why a sermon in the current issue of Journal for Preachers caught my attention. The author got me thinking about how often the Bible portrays God creating new life in circumstances of confusion and chaos. In the Hebrew Testament, consider Genesis 1:2, which describes a “formless void,” a “darkness” covering “the face of the deep,” a “wind” sweeping over the waters. Then God says, “Let there be light.” When the Hebrews are enslaved by the Egyptians, when the judges and the kings lead Israel’s wars, when God’s people are exiled and threatened with destruction, God is revealed to be powerful by bringing life into chaos. Only God could do this because, as Ryan Bonfiglio writes, “ancient Israel’s history was one of perpetual chaos ….”[1]

Then, Bonfiglio makes the interpretative leap from past to present. “(Today) our families, churches, and communities all are the products of complex, messy, and often broken systems. We don’t get to parachute in and start creating, loving, and leading out of nothing. We inherit chaos ….”[2] We Presbyterians have a reputation for liking things done “decently and in order,” so chaos is a state we prefer to exit as quickly as possible. What would happen if we could stay with chaos long enough to see it as an opportunity for God to generate new life?

Maybe that was key to the success of Jesus’ disciples on the Day of Pentecost. Maybe they wanted to run back to the calm of the upper room. But they stuck with the chaos in the public square. After a while, they began to understand what the Holy Spirit was doing. Bonfiglio describes it this way. “The Spirit in Acts 2 does not demand simplistic uniformity. Those on the margins (the pilgrims in Diaspora) did not need to conform to the ways and language of those at the religious center (the disciples in Jerusalem). Rather, it was the other way around. The center changes to accommodate the margins. The pilgrims hear the disciples speaking (in) their own native tongues. The birth of God’s church could not and would not be founded on the insistence of a linguistic monoculture ….”

“After Pentecost the pilgrims would have returned to their native countries equipped to bear witness to Jesus in and through language, idioms, and imagery that their friends and neighbors would already have known. This not only would have made sharing the gospel easier. It would have underscored theologically that the message of Jesus could not be pinned to any one culture, it could not be tethered to any one set of experiences, traditions, practices.”[3]  In other words, the diversity that creates discomfort was also the diversity that made the Church strong. God met the chaos, and brought life from it, a new life that the original disciples could not completely understand or control.

If we take this aspect of the Pentecost story to be normative, one lesson is this: In God’s church, those on the margins do not need to conform to the cultural norms of those at the center. Rather, the center changes to accommodate the margins. This can be expressed in other ways. Here’s one: The Church that God is creating isn’t about calling people to fill the needs of the ones already here, but rather calling the ones already here to fill the needs of others who, one day in the future, will be.  

During the 37 years I’ve pastored, I’ve listened to many planning conversations and read many survey replies. I’ve noticed that when we ask about needs, one of the most common replies is “We need new members!” Have you ever thought about how that need, spoken or unspoken, may be translated in the minds of friends and visitors? Some may go away thinking, “It feels like they need new members who cherish the same traditions, who will take over committee assignments when their energy wanes, pay the pledges when their income wanes, and provide care for them as we age.”  From our perspective, some of those expectations seem fair. I staff twelve different task groups in this church, and I regularly feel them, too. We’re all looking for people to provide volunteer resources, financial resources, to offer care and compassion in a world where time feels in short supply. 

Still, when I read Acts 2, it looks like the Spirit was doing something different on the Day of Pentecost. God was bringing from the chaos new life that the original disciples could not predict or control. Does the experience of Peter and the apostles hold a lesson for us? What new and wonderful thing might happen if we could stay with chaos long enough to look into it, and see how God is generating new life?

Thanks to everyone who previously returned a needs-identification response form or e-mail.  Earlier this week, your responses were summarized on the newsprint sheets you’ll see posted in the Gathering Space.  They’ll provide the starting point for today’s lunch and conversation.

It's my hope and prayer that today’s worship experience provides a little bit of biblical and theological orientation to that conversation. What human needs can we see emerging from the chaos of our time that we and other members of our community are living through? Where do we see God opening up an opportunity to match our particular gifts and resources to those needs?  Can we, who occupy the religious center in this place, change our ways to accommodate those on the margin?  Can we shift our focus from the question, “How do we get them to join us so that we survive?” and toward the question, “How do we serve them so that they thrive?” May God grant us wise minds, compassionate hearts to identify one need that we will work together to fill.

NOTES

[1] Ryan P. Bonfiglio, “Creation Out of Chaos,” Journal for Preachers, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Pentecost 2024, p. 7.

[2] Bonfiglio, p. 7.

[3] Bonfiglio, p. 11.

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