The Road to the Church: A Pentecostal Journey

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I want you to imagine with me a road trip, long, long ago. This was back in the days before you could enter an address into your magic box and a voice would tell you where to go next. Back in these dark ages, in order to find where you were going, you would need to use an actual piece of paper, with words and lines printed on it. Road trip participants called it…a map. On road trips when I was young, I loved studying the map. I would gaze upon those amazing pieces of paper and imagine what it would be like to travel to all of those places, or how long it would take to get from place to place, or what it would be like to visit them.

Then, at a certain point in time, an amazing development occurred: The TripTik. Before your road trip, you would walk into a AAA office, and tell them where you were going on your road trip. And then you would come back a week later, and they would have created a personalized portfolio of maps, just for you, just for your road trip. There would be a series of maps for your route, with your roads highlighted. There were close-up maps to navigate any busy cities you would travel through. On the back of each section map, there would be lists of what you would see on the route: hotels, restaurants, rest stops, points of interest. Each step of the way, the TripTik would be your guide. On our road trips, I would hold that TripTik as if it had divine power, watching as the miles went by, anticipating the next turn, picking out what points of interest we absolutely had to stop and see. The TripTik held amazing power for me, to take away uncertainty, unpredictability, or volatility. It had near-divine power!

 How many of us wish we had a TripTik to help us navigate life? Wouldn’t it be awesome to wake up in the morning and have a TripTik on the nightstand waiting for us? Everything we were supposed to do would be highlighted and ready for us? How we are supposed to talk to our family members, and spend our money, and make our life choices, and what to have for dinner, and which show or movie we should watch on TV that night?

It is interesting how many of us live out of that yearning for control and certainty and clarity. Psychologist Carla Marie Manly writes about that need for control. She writes, “we too often wake up thinking ‘if only I could control my diet, my work, my kids, my dog, my body, my age, my thoughts, my feelings, my living space, my relationship, my life, grocery prices, gas prices,  climate change, politics, and natural disasters, life would be easy…I’d feel so much better.’”

Anyone else relate?

There are a million reasons why we yearn for that control and certainty in our lives. Sometimes there is a clinical, mental health issue, where trauma or anxiety trigger something in our brains, and there is a need for significant and sustained mental health treatment.

But for the rest of us, we just kind of want to be in control. We get this message, from Madison avenue advertisers, and “defend my rights” politicians, that we should be in control of every aspect of our own lives, the lives of family members, the lives of friends, even the rest of the world if we could! But psychologist and author (and Lawrencian) Harriet Lerner says it’s all an illusion; she writes about the illusion of control. We think we are—or we should be—in control of more than we actually are, but it is just an illusion. In reality, so much of life is outside of our control and failure to recognize this leads us to anger at ourselves or at the world for not being what we want it to be. We stomp around angry at the world around us for not being as controllable as we would like. We are not really in control, even though we like to think we are.

I think that the same was true in the Early Church. Over the last several weeks, we have been travelling with members of the Early Church as they try their hardest to control the road in front of them and their fellow travelers:

• Today’s Pentecost text is preceded by the story of Jesus ascending into heaven, telling his disciples to wait until the Holy Spirit comes. But their need for control and structure and clarity broke through, and they tried to restructure the 12-Apostle hierarchy by finding a replacement for the betrayer, Judas. It wasn’t a bad sentiment, but it seemed a little foolish in the wake of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Their attempt at structure and control looked silly.

• Philip met an Ethiopian Eunuch, on his way home from the temple regulations that had kept him out of the ability to worship.

• Saul felt threatened by the Jesus-followers, and used his power to try and wrestle them to his belief structure instead. But by the time he was laid out on the Road to Damascus, he was starting to realize that his attempts to control the situation were more than a little ridiculous.

• Thus, his message to the Galatians was one of freedom and openness in Jesus. So, you can imagine his exasperation when a faction from Jerusalem came behind him and told them that they needed to follow their religious practices before they could follow Jesus. Talk about a need for control! “I understand that you have a saving and Spirit-filled relationship with Jesus, but I’m going to need you to put that on hold until you start living in the same way that I like to live!” By the time that we get to the fifth Chapter of Paul’s letter to them, he is in a frenzy that they feel the need to control the work of the Spirit in this way.

This “circumcision faction” gets called different things by different scholars: Agitators, Missionaries, sometimes they have been called Judiazers. I don’t necessarily love that term, for the reason that Pastor Cristina mentioned last week: this book has been used extensively by Christians to demonstrate why it is OK to direct anger and even widespread violence at Jewish people, even and especially by Christians. But the point of the text is not the Jewish part…it is the need for this specific group of Jewish Christians to control others through Jewish practices. If Paul were here today, I would suggest that he could be just as mad at what could be called “Christian-izers” or “Democrat-izers” or “Republican-izers” or “Presbyterian-izers.” The problem is the “-izers!” When any group feels the need to control another group, to force others into our religious or ideological structure, divisive chaos is the result. Case in point, in the first part of the passage, there is this list of actions that Paul insists are “fleshly,” not of the Spirit. But ever since he wrote the letter, Christians have been using that list as a checklist of “naughty” behaviors to attack, disfellowship, and shame others, Christian or not. They have used this list as a way to “-izer” others, the very thing that Paul was angry at the circumcision faction for!

But I think there is something else going on with this list, and the one that follows it. The very first verb in the passage is translated in the NRSV to “live” in the Spirit, but scholar Richard Hays suggests that the Greek more literally says “walk in the Spirit.” Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, wisdom authors and prophets write that living a Godly life is not about a list of prescriptive “do’s and don’ts,” as much as a description of what living looks like when you walk in the way of God. These are the destructive behaviors that are a result of stepping off of that road. And you’ll notice that they are all symptoms of living a life with a need for control: sexual abuse instead of healthy relationships, attempts to control the world through spiritual manipulation, divisive behaviors that drive wedges between people, making idols of things on earth as a stand-in for God. Again, these are not a checklist of “naughty behaviors” to avoid, but symptoms of failure to walk with the Spirit. Hays calls them all “community-splitting” behaviors. The Jerusalem faction is splitting the Galatian community, because they fail to walk with the Spirit.

So what happens when you stay on that road, and walk in the Spirit? Fruit! In one of the most beautiful sections in the book, and in the New Testament, Paul shares the inverse of the previous list. And it is once again descriptive and not prescriptive. He doesn’t tell the Galatians to go work harder at joy. And go do some peace. And perfect your patience. It isn’t a checklist of things to go and work harder at, in a task list of certainty and control. In fact, Paul repeats that same verb as before, the only real thing that we can do: “walk by the Spirit.” When we choose this path, these are the fruits of that life. It’s like the back of the TripTik: “Here are the things that you will see when you travel this road.” Again, it is Hays that points out that we cannot manufacture fruit. There are no orange factories. All we can do is create ideal conditions for fruit to grow, and the plants do the rest. In the same way, all we can do is walk with the Spirit, and then the fruit of that Spirit will show up.

See the contrast between the two lists? If the first is a list of “community-splitting” actions, the second is a list of community-building fruit. Joining. Connecting. Empowering. Instead of demanding control over another, it is the work of relinquishing control to God and other. Of trusting God and other. Of connecting to God and other. That’s what the Spirit of God does!

So how do we walk in the Spirit? How do we live that life that avoids community-splitting behaviors and embraces community-building community? Both Acts and Galatians show us how.

First, look back to the Pentecost story. Both before and after the move to replace Judas, it says that they were gathered and waiting. If we are to walk in the Spirit, I think it means a move from control…to quiet. We rush to fill in our devotional practices with more “to-do” and “ought-to” when Jesus tells us to wait. Be quiet. Be patient. Walking in the Spirit doesn’t always mean activity. When we wait in the quiet of the Spirit, that’s when we learn to avoid the community-splitting behaviors of the culture around us, and begin to see the fruit of the Spirit. And what fruit do we see when we do? True joy, not just distraction or fleeting happiness. Peace that passes all understanding. Patience, as we learn to wait on God and on one another.

And look back at Galatians. Right before the passage I read, Paul writes that the law is summed up by neighbor love. Not neighbor control, but love. For us to walk in the Spirit, we have to give up control…to embrace community. Move from “-izer” behavior to listening and learning from neighbor. And the fruit? Of course love, of God and all of God’s children. Kindness, as we change the way that we see our neighbor. Gentleness, a fruit that is usually seen as weakness in our world and culture.

Finally, look once again at Harriet Lerner, who invites us move from control (or at least the illusion of control)…to courage. Courage, she says, is about taking action, even if we don’t know the end result. Courage is about listening and learning from others, instead of trying to control them. Courage is about using our God-given gifts instead of retreating to uniformity or “groupthink.” Courage is about being accountable, to ourselves, to others, and to God. Courage is about being vulnerable, risking to be in relationship with others. And the fruit? Generosity, as it allows us to risk the resources we have been given. Faithfulness, because we can trust God and other. And self-control, because we have confidence in who God has made us to be.

As we conclude a sermon on walking and a series on road trips, it seems only appropriate for me to end with this weekend’s Blue Team trip to the Ozarks. Before I left, I had in mind what the trip would be, when and where I would run, and what I would see and experience. And almost none of that happened. We had to change our long trail run plan, but that allowed us to climb through caves and see a hundred waterfalls! There was much more rain than we expected, so instead of crossing low-level creeks, we were shimmying over trees across them, taking off our shoes and wading through, and finally just leaving our shoes on and sloshing up the trail! None of it was exactly what we expected, but in the unexpected came the adventure. In the uncontrolled came the grace of the moment.

Is that not what the road trip of faith is all about? Is that not the walk of the Spirit? When we think we know what we are doing and where we are going and keep it all under our control, it hampers the work of the Spirit. But when we strap on our shoes and take off into the unknown of the life of faith, you’ll be surprised how the Spirit shows up!